While he acknowledges the influence of Queensland’s bipartisan history of populist leaders, the best-known of whom was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Blaine also suggests that John Howard has particularly influenced Dutton’s socially conservative culture-war focus on issues such as race and immigration. But while Howard used a dog whistle, he writes, Dutton uses a foghorn.

Blaine highlights the most contentious statements that Dutton has made about race and ethnicity, from his claims about African gangs terrorising Melbourne’s would-be diners to his criticism of Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser for letting in too many Lebanese. He also analyses Dutton’s most contentious ministerial actions in portfolios ranging from workplace participation and immigration to home affairs. Victims of Dutton’s “bad cop” toughness range from the unemployed and single mothers, who suffered from his demonisation of welfare recipients, to deportees, particularly Māori and Pacific Island New Zealanders, who encountered the sharp end of Dutton’s law and order push.

As a minister Dutton may have been an authoritarian populist, but Blaine reminds us that while he was home affairs minister his department awarded highly questionable and very expensive contracts to the companies chosen to manage offshore detention. Visa abuses involving those who came to Australia by plane — ranging from the exploitation of “modern-day indentured labourers” and “sex slaves” to the entry of “Albanian gangsters” — meanwhile went unheeded.

Dutton’s selective toughness has a clear strategic rationale. On numerous occasions he has set out his plan to win government especially by using culture war tactics to attract working-class voters in outer-suburban seats traditionally held by Labor. He claims that cost-of-living pressures and other challenges faced by workers have been neglected by a Labor government preoccupied with woke “frolics” on issues such as the Voice. He argues that crime (often associated by Dutton with racial or ethnic groups) is out of control, and often a particular threat to women. It is a strategy that draws on John Howard, Tony Abbott and Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, both Liberal and Labor critics believe that Dutton’s strategy is flawed for modern-day Australia. It might be suited to his own seat of Dickson, writes Blaine, where the vast majority of residents are Australian born, “but he has little experience speaking to electorates in Sydney and Melbourne with significant Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas.” Here, Dutton’s bad cop routine can come unstuck, as when his strongman rhetoric on national security issues alienated Chinese-Australian voters.

Nor, Blaine points out, does Australia have the equivalent of Trump’s “heartland states filled with rust belts, nor the political system that makes them disproportionately powerful.” Yet winning back affluent teal seats, whose voters are alienated by Dutton’s rhetoric, may still prove crucial if the Liberals are to win government in their own right.

Blaine is at his best analysing such issues. Nonetheless, some of his insights — particularly regarding Dutton’s strongman persona — could be developed further or in a different direction. He argues that Dutton’s “raison d’être” is to “Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.” Recent events — fears evoked by the Voice referendum, for example, and crime in Alice Springs, and offences committed by immigration detainees released by a High Court decision — have fed into that strategy.

Blaine argues that Dutton is attuned to key voters’ “deepest fears” not because he is “a genius or a psychic, but because he was also afraid of change.” Possibly “because he would have felt emasculated by the truth,” Dutton has never fully explained why he left the police force. Consequently he is “always displaying simplicity and strength. Because he feels so complicated and weak.” Indeed, Blaine depicts Dutton as an inherently fragile human being: “Tall and strong at first glance. But when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared.”

Blaine’s psychological assessment of Dutton is intriguing and possibly insightful. But additional or alternative interpretations would have been worth exploring in more depth. After all, as Blaine himself acknowledges, conservatives’ mobilisation of fear against Labor governments is far from new. Conservative ideology is inherently wary of change, so this doesn’t necessarily reflect Dutton’s own vulnerabilities.

Similarly, the Liberals have a long history of using strongman politics to try to emasculate their Labor opponents, so Dutton’s appearance of strength may not be concealing deeper insecurities about his own masculinity. As Blaine himself notes, Dutton’s comment that Albanese is “a weak and woke prime minister” evokes Howard’s description of Kim Beazley as lacking “ticker.”

The point about strongman politics is precisely that it is a performance of masculinity, and of protective masculinity in particular. Dutton is arguably not so much offering to be the “bad cop” who is the “lesser of two evils,” to use Blaine’s words, as offering to be a strong “good cop” who defends those he perceives as upstanding citizens from the dangers he argues weak Labor politicians are exposing them to. He is offering to be a traditional masculine protector who will keep his favoured voters safe from “woke” identity politics, from the elites, from criminals, from China, from reduced living standards and even from the undermining of gender binaries. He’ll only be the “bad cop” to those his would-be supporters resent and fear.

Dutton’s potential appeal is therefore also broader than Bad Cop credits. Blaine writes, for example, that Dutton is a “practitioner of right-wing identity politics” who highlights difference and has spent his career “persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism.” Dutton does indeed have a narrow view of Australian cultural identity that marginalises some Australians and privileges others. Despite attempts to construct him as a “big gentle giant” who genuinely cares about people, his expressions of empathy are highly selective. Nonetheless, it is a bit more complicated than Blaine suggests.

For example, Dutton’s arguments against the Voice actually constructed him as a champion of egalitarianism, but one who argued that equality means treating all Australians the same regardless of their needs or circumstances. It is a longstanding argument by social conservatives. Dutton highlights difference when it serves his purpose but also denies its salience, arguing that he is defending the vast bulk of Australians from the “divisive” identity politics of the elites. Indeed, this argument lies at the heart of his populism. Dutton’s close association with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, meanwhile, a National Party senator with a similar conception of equality, helps to defuse accusations of racial bias.

Dutton’s styling of himself as a strong male economic provider who will protect voters from rising living costs is a common political strategy that draws on the traditional role of the male head of household as protector and provider. It too channels Howard, Abbott and Trump. Trump’s campaign in particular has long targeted working-class males.

This is a gender politics that Labor needs to take seriously. Labor won office partly on the argument that the Liberals had a woman problem, as indeed they do. But Dutton wants Labor to have a men problem.

Albanese needs to tread cautiously. His emphasising of the fact that Dutton’s team “is dominated by blokes” and “they keep having preselections and putting up more blokes” will play well with many female voters and socially progressive men. But it could be phrased more strategically. Albanese needs to be careful that he isn’t depicted as being “anti-bloke” as well as woke, especially with the Coalition mobilising old climate wars rhetoric to suggest that real men don’t drive electric vehicles but do embrace nuclear power.

Despite Dutton’s claims, the Labor government has been making serious efforts to tackle wage stagnation, precarious employment and other working-class issues, often encountering business and Liberal opposition in the process. Many of the social equity reforms the government has pursued, including improving the pay of under-valued female-dominated jobs and lowering childcare expenses, have also had benefits for workers and have reduced living costs. Nonetheless, the government is vulnerable to Dutton’s charges of working-class neglect given that inflation and high interest rates continue to undermine many of its best efforts.

As well as successfully tackling living costs, Albanese will need to win the argument that his form of caring, socially inclusive masculine leadership is not a sign of weakness but is better for Australians in general than Peter Dutton’s alternative. After all, gender politics isn’t an aside in Dutton’s politics, it is central. Democrats successfully targeted Trump’s masculinity during the 2020 presidential election campaign by arguing for the benefits of a different kind of protective male leadership — although their task was made easier then by the politics of the pandemic and is made harder now by Biden’s frailty.

We wait to see how successful Labor will be in countering Dutton’s strongman politics, as well as his attempts to encroach on Labor’s heartland. •

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics
By Lech Blaine | Quarterly Essay | $27.99 | 172 pages

The post Good cop, bad cop appeared first on Inside Story.

The sheer volume of material continues to fuel efforts to document and analyse the career of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. The latest is a multi-author, multi-volume (four are promised) appraisal edited by the Menzies Institute’s Zachary Gorman. Based on a series of conferences, the books aim to promote “discussion, critical analysis and reflection on Menzies, the era he defined and his enduring legacy.” Contributions are not limited to those of unabashed admirers; writers from the other side of the political fence also offer their assessments, as do ostensible neutrals.

The first volume, The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, covers the period from Menzies’s birth in 1894 to 1942, though not all chapters fit neatly within those boundaries. James Edelman and Angela Kittikhoun’s useful chapter on Menzies and the law, for example, takes in the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, eight years beyond 1942.

Following political scientist (and ex-MP) David Kemp’s introduction, the book’s early chapters focus on the family environment into which Menzies was born and the social and political culture of the era. As most readers will be aware, his father ran a general store in the western Victorian town of Jeparit, saving the son from any credible charges of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But while the small business ethos had a crucial impact on Menzies’s political philosophy, he was exposed to a different worldview by his maternal grandfather, John Sampson, an active trade unionist, though without being persuaded to change his own emerging outlook.

Menzies’s academic record in Melbourne University’s law faculty was outstanding and he also took part in student politics and campus journalism. His failure to enlist during the first world war — a family decision prompted by the fact that two brothers were already serving — is well known, and journalist Troy Bramston reveals how it may have contributed to Menzies’s fiancée’s ultimate decision to break off their engagement. Menzies had no doubt that his failure to enlist propelled him away from a brilliant legal career and onto the parliamentary path. He needed to offer “public service.”

For this reviewer, one of the most interesting chapters is historian Greg Melluish’s account of Menzies’s advocacy of liberal education and its connection with his ideas about democracy. That Menzies was a “scholarship boy” at both school and university is reasonably well known and, Melluish argues, helps explain his support for “meritocracy” rather than inherited and entrenched privilege (with an obvious exemption for the monarchy). This commitment seems crucial in explaining Menzies’s insistence that he (and later, his party) was liberal, not conservative.

Of course, conservatism existed (and exists) in Australia, and the parties Menzies joined and led garnered the vast preponderance of that vote. He revered English political and legal institutions as springing from liberal values, but their defence surely entailed a conservative outlook. Melluish stresses that Menzies understood English democracy as reflective of a specific common culture; in contrast to the Americans, “he did not see democracy as being universally applicable.” This could help explain why conservatives may view multiculturalism as a problem, undermining the necessary foundations of their version of democracy — a question that will perhaps be tackled in later volumes. Of course, Menzies’s view could also lend itself to the darker idea that democracy is not suitable for all, especially those viewed as “backward.”

Among other prime ministers, probably only Gough Whitlam could be as closely identified with the case for liberal education. For Menzies, writing in the 1930s, British history demonstrated that such an education “would produce the sorts of people who possessed the capacities to make that system of government [Westminster] work properly.” Ironically, in view of today’s emphasis on utilitarian degrees, Menzies can be seen as enlisting the (now) maligned bachelor of arts in defence of the practical aim of good government.

Melluish also usefully distinguishes between Menzies’s idea of a liberal education and the wider idea of “Western civilisation.” Menzies was fixated on Australia’s British heritage; the Greek and Roman stuff could, it seems, be left to people like Whitlam.

Menzies’s version of the university was obviously not the “oppositional” one. But, as Melluish points out, this critical variant was emerging at the time Menzies was writing. It would probably approach its zenith during the second half of Menzies’s long term in office — which should make for an interesting discussion in the final volume in this series.

Political scientist Judith Brett explores the parallels between Menzies and Alfred Deakin, sons of small businessmen, both of them influenced by the liberalism of the Victorian goldfields, both following very similar educational paths, and of course, both having more than one go as prime minister. It is Deakin, she writes, “whom Menzies might have looked to as an exemplar of national leadership.”

A useful reminder of the important role religion could play in forming political beliefs comes in historian David Furse-Roberts’s chapter on the impact of Menzies’s Presbyterianism. The connection between his faith and his political philosophy seems so strong that a liberal atheist might have felt less than welcome in the party Menzies would form. And, had he been around, Menzies may well have been puzzled to observe some Liberal staffers take an affirmation rather than an oath when they appeared in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten and one of its journalists.

By contrast, it would be an oddity today if any senior politician identified mainstream religion (as opposed to the “prosperity gospel” variant embraced by some prominent conservatives) as a key factor in their political outlook. As judged by Furse-Roberts, Menzies’s version of Presbyterianism emphasised a “selfless individualism,” acknowledging the ameliorative role of the state but also its limitations: “it fell primarily to the compassionate spirit and self-sacrifice of individuals to succour the needy and further the common good.” This clearly eschews socialism, but Furse-Roberts suggests it goes “far beyond John Stuart Mill’s minimalist ethic of ‘no harm’ to others.” One might observe how that reference to the “common good” contrasts with the overwhelmingly individualist emphasis of the more recent version of the Liberal Party.

Historian Frank Bongiorno’s chapter, “Menzies and Curtin at War,” is a finely balanced contribution, acknowledging the positives of Menzies’s first prime ministership and also (in anticipation) recognising his “postwar nation-building achievements,” which “look better every year, as we contemplate the policy failures of our own century and the conspicuous absence of compelling vision.” This generosity from a Labor-leaning historian suggests that the defensiveness of Liberal partisans in certain chapters may to some extent have been directed at a shrinking target.

Anne Henderson mounts a characteristically robust defence of Menzies from charges of appeasement and softness on Nazi Germany, stressing the absence of a perfect record among any of the key players. Mindful of the passage of time, I was left wondering how many Australians would know to whom “Pig-Iron Bob” refers. How many in the press gallery?

Journalist Nick Cater examines the role of Menzies’s famous “The Forgotten People” radio address in 1942, highlighting the importance of the family home as the central focus of that talk. While a Labor minister could deride this support for increased home ownership as turning workers into “little capitalists,” Menzies’s philosophy emphasised the “social, economic and moral value of home ownership.” Saving for a home was a “concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving.” National patriotism, in other words, “inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.” How might the renters on the battlefields in 1942 have responded to this observation, I wonder?

Political scientist Scott Prasser sums up the learning experiences that would enable Menzies to resurrect his career and become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. This involves some projection, for he still had much learning to do (during seven more years as opposition leader) after the notional end date for this volume. That quibble aside, Prasser’s contribution is a useful one since Menzies’s success can’t be attributed mostly to luck and dud opponents. The checklist: modest promises, sound coalition relations, a willingness to adopt new directions, and an awareness of the nation’s political architecture. His return to power and the use to which he put his learning experiences await us in the next volume.

In his introduction to the second and latest of the series, The Menzies Watershed, editor Zachary Gorman acknowledges the limitations of the “call for conference papers” method the project employs, which risks missing “certain topics of great interest and relevance.” This dilemma is reflected in the ensuing chapters, with some likely to be of appeal to the general political scholar–aficionado and others more in the niche category. My focus will be largely on the former.

In his chapter on Menzies and the Movement, Lucas McLennan makes the case for a good deal of similarity of emphasis between Menzies’s Anglo-Protestantism and the version of Catholic social teaching (and consequent public policy) embraced by lawyer–activist B.A. Santamaria and his disciples in the (Catholic Social Studies) Movement. It is certainly the case that both men would have seen their vigorous anti-communism as having a strong religious component, especially reflected in the anti-communist foreign and defence policies embraced by Menzies’s party and endorsed by Santamaria and (after the Labor Party’s split in 1955) his political creation the Democratic Labor Party.

McLennan’s case is possibly less convincing on the domestic front. While the Movement may have preferred subsidiarity over centralism, it seems unlikely that Menzies would have seen much merit in the (frankly weird) land settlement proposals advanced by Santamaria. And we can be fairly confident that the Movement’s view (as expressed in 1948) that Christians should seek “to break up concentration of wealth” would not have secured much support at a meeting of the Kooyong branch of the Liberal Party. Ultimately, even Santamaria’s version of Catholic social teaching necessarily involved an element of collectivism that would not have appealed to Menzies.

Anne Henderson’s brief chapter on Menzies’s successful opposition to Labor’s bank nationalisation plans possibly tells the reader as much about the Chifley government’s ideological rigidity (or commitment to principle — take your pick) and misreading of the public mood as it does about Menzies’s deft exploitation of the issue. Two decades after the Depression, the anti-banks sentiment was clearly not what it used to be, although Henderson’s depiction of the banks battle as “class war as Australia had never seen it” might have been challenged by some survivors from that period. In passing, it might be observed that since Labor lost the double dissolution election it provoked on this issue in 1951, it has not held a Senate majority on any occasion.

Tom Switzer evidences and reinforces the generally accepted wisdom that Menzies was no radical right-wing reformer. He retained and relied on several of the senior bureaucrats who had advised Chifley, and his economic policies were of the Keynesian variety, reflecting a consensus that would persist until the end of the Fraser period. In his introduction to this volume, Gorman had noted Menzies’s good fortune in not being “exposed to a centre-right echo chamber of policy advice,” insulating him from big overreaches (with the exception of the attempt to ban the Communist Party).

Keynesianism is again a key theme in David Lee’s chapter on economic management. It also contains a useful outline of cabinet and public service structures and processes in the early years of the Menzies government.

Troy Bramston’s chapter, “The Art of Power,” draws on his well-received biography of Menzies and hence comment here will be minimal: Menzies had been an effective political campaigner, “but campaigning is not government” (wise advice). Building on his previous experience, consultation, reflection and wide reading, he developed a capacity for management and administration that served him well.

Charles Richardson examines aspects of Menzies’s approach to the crown and imperial relations, the Statute of Westminster and the office of governor-general, drawing some comparisons with the attitudes of his nemesis H.V. Evatt. In referring to Menzies’s concern about the “separate status of the crown in right of the different dominions”— the question of how the monarch could be at peace and war at the same time in relation to the same foreign power — Richardson delightfully describes this as an “absurdity” that we still live with. The fact that most wars are now waged without formal declarations of war may help, at least at a technical level.

Richardson endorses the view that Menzies should have made the switch from a British to an Australian governor-general before Casey’s appointment in 1965, but notes the prime minister’s quaint criterion that it was essential with any appointment that “the Queen knew them.”

Lyndon Megarrity seeks to correct the misconception that Australia’s involvement with overseas students only commenced with the Colombo Plan. He outlines the history of such activity (which could involve some fancy manoeuvring round the White Australia policy) and describes policy before the second world war as “ad hoc and reactive.” The Chifley government entered the soft diplomacy business of scholarships, but Megarrity sees any potential benefits as being negated by immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s notorious hardline attitude on deportations: no grey areas in the White Australia policy for him.

The role of the new external affairs minister Percy Spender in the creation of the Colombo Plan in 1950 is well known. While acknowledging the Chifley government’s creation (pre-Colombo) of a relevant policy management framework, Megarrity credits the Menzies government with a defter handling than Labor of tensions between the Plan and the White Australia policy, assisting with the overall enhancement of Australia’s reputation in the region. In the cold war context, the scheme could “help maintain stability in Southeast Asia and increase resistance to Communism.”

Chapters on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and on the role of Spender in (among other things) negotiating the ANZUS treaty serve to highlight the electoral supremacy the Menzies government would establish as the guardian of national security, an advantage his party has largely retained to the present day. Nicolle Flint revisits the issue (it probably no longer qualifies as a “debate”) over whether Menzies’s role in the Liberal Party’s creation has been overstated (spoiler alert: no). Lorraine Finlay, addressing the dilemma of “what liberty should be provided for the enemies of liberty,” focuses on the attempts to ban the Communist Party, though current trends may remind us of the timelessness of that dilemma. Andrew Blyth provides an account of think tanks’ influence on the Menzies government, but to some extent the title is misleading: the Institute of Public Affairs was effectively the only player in that game, although pressure groups and committees of inquiry are also covered in the chapter.

Christopher Beer’s chapter uses the federal electorate of Robertson on the central New South Wales coast to make some observations about the impact of early Menzies government policies. He includes useful electoral information about the seat, which serves (for this reviewer) to highlight the absence of comparable nationwide electoral data and commentary on the elections of the period. Clearly, the “call for papers” did not evince the relevant interest.

By the end of the period covered in this volume, Menzies had won three elections as Liberal leader, disarming his internal critics, and even greater dominance lay ahead: Labor partisans might like to look away now. •

The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Publishing | $44.99 | 222 pages

The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-Communism, Continuities 1943–1954
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $45 | 256 pages

The post The younger Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

Evatt’s move from court to federal parliament was considered “a most regrettable precedent” by Menzies, who was by then prime minister. (While it may have been regrettable, it wasn’t much of a precedent, never being repeated over the ensuing eighty-three years.) Evatt responded in kind, suggesting that Menzies would lose the next election. (That, too, proved a less than accurate prediction.) As Anne Henderson sees it in her new book, Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, battle was joined from that time.

Reading Henderson’s opening chapters it’s hard not to be staggered by Evatt’s workload as external affairs minister and attorney-general. No minister today would take on these dual roles, and Henderson highlights the difficulties the combination caused for Labor in government, especially at a time of war.

It would have been a punishing load for the best-organised minister (which Evatt clearly was not), and was exacerbated by his frequent absences overseas in the pre-jet age, including a year as president of the UN General Assembly. As an often-absentee attorney-general, he was unable to contribute fully to vital tasks, including defending the government’s bank nationalisation plan before the High Court.

Evatt became Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951. His role later that year in defeating Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party is seen by many as his finest moment, but Henderson downplays the victory. Support for the ban was recorded by polls at 73 per cent in early August but by polling day, six weeks later, it had dropped to just under 50 per cent. (The referendum was carried in only three states.) Henderson cites the history of defeated referendum proposals and asks why the Yes even got close — as if falling support for the ban followed a law of nature regardless of effective political campaigning.

It’s true that early support for many referendum proposals has evaporated by polling day. But it is difficult to think of a question for which Yes campaigners enjoyed more favourable circumstances than this one. The cold war was in full swing, Australian troops were fighting the communists on the Korean peninsula (under a UN flag), and communism was seen as an existential threat, broadly detested within the electorate. Menzies had warned of the possibility of a third world war within three years; strong anti-communist elements within Evatt’s own party supported the ban.

Indeed, one might equally ask why Menzies couldn’t pull it off. I suspect that he would have appreciated the irony that it was the internationalist Evatt, not the Anglophile Menzies, who campaigned by citing British justice’s onus on the state to prove guilt rather than (as the anti-communists proposed) on the accused to prove innocence.

As with most failed referendums, the loss did the prime minister no harm. In fact, Henderson makes the interesting suggestion that it saved him from having to enact legislation that may “have been as divisive and unsettling to civic order” as the McCarthy hearings were in the United States. It’s impossible to prove of course, but Australia definitely didn’t need that kangaroo court–type assault on individuals’ reputations and lives.

Henderson’s account of the Petrov affair and the subsequent royal commission — a disastrous time for Evatt — traverses territory that is probably less contentious than it was a generation ago. On the Labor Party’s 1955 split, she quotes with approval the claim by former Liberal prime minister John Howard that Labor’s rules afforded too much power to its national executive: a more genuinely federal structure (like that of the Liberals) would have rendered Evatt’s intervention more difficult and a split in the party less likely.

Whether a Victorian Labor branch left mostly to its own devices would have sorted out its problems is unclear, but the opportunity was unlikely given the hostility of Evatt and his supporters to the group of Victorians they saw as treacherous anti-communists. Ironically, it was this capacity to intervene that would facilitate a federal takeover of the moribund (and still split-crippled) Victorian ALP fifteen years later. That intervention eventually reinvigorated the state branch, establishing a Labor dominance in Victorian state elections and in the state’s federal seats that persists to the present day.

Henderson also poses the question of whether a different Labor leader could have avoided the split. What if deputy leader Arthur Calwell had been installed after the 1954 election loss? She speculates that Calwell might have been able to offer concessions to the anti-communist Victorians and stresses an absence of intense ideological fervour among many of those who would soon be expelled from the party.

While it is hard to envisage a leader handling the crisis less effectively than Evatt did, Henderson quotes Labor MP Fred Daly’s view that Calwell at the time was “hesitant, uncertain and waiting for Evatt’s job” — hardly the stuff of firm leadership. Arthur was always prepared to wait.

It may be true that most of the anti-communist Labor MPs, even in Victoria, were not fervent ideologues, but possibly more relevant was the ideological predisposition of the powerful Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria, who was able to influence state Labor’s decision-making bodies and preselections from outside the party. Santamaria boasted in 1952 to his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, that his Catholic Social Studies Movement (the infamous “Movement”) would be able to transform the leadership of the Labor movement within a few years and install federal and state MPs able to implement “a Christian social program.”

This may have been overly ambitious nationally, but Santamaria’s undue influence over Victorian Labor was already a concern for some. Moreover, the party Santamaria envisaged might be viewed as essentially a church or “confessional” party, at odds with traditional Australian “Laborism,” not to mention with the main elements of a pluralist, secular democracy.

Henderson’s most interesting observation, for this reviewer, is her contention that Evatt’s lack of anti-communist conviction owed much to his being “an intense secularist.” It is certainly the case that critics of communism in this era often preceded the noun with the adjectives “godless” or “atheistic.” In a predominantly Christian society like Australia, communism’s atheistic nature was a damning feature, especially among Catholics, including Catholic Labor MPs. Presbyterian Menzies also held strongly to this view.

If this review has focused more on Evatt than on Menzies, this reflects the enduring questions Evatt’s leadership raises — including the state of his mental health, which is seen by some as helping to explain his erratic and self-destructive behaviour. (Henderson doesn’t consider this question, but it was well covered by biographer John Murphy.)

Menzies, having survived the referendum result, was also undaunted by his narrow election victory in 1954, secured with a minority of the vote, a lucky escape to be repeated in 1961. He went for the Evatt jugular whenever it was exposed — which was often, as Henderson shows vividly. John Howard would later claim, on his own behalf, that the times suited him. Menzies had that advantage in spades, and he exploited it artfully.

If there is a central theme to Menzies’s approach to his battle with Evatt, it is his characterisation of the Labor leader as a naive internationalist, oblivious to the emerging threat of monolithic communism, especially to the north of Australia. This is a criticism endorsed by Henderson. A cynic might suggest that the communist threat was not only electoral gold for Menzies but also provided a convenient pretext for him to maintain his unwavering support for European colonialism. Better the colonialists than the communists.

Neither character was a team player by instinct, but Menzies adapted better and learned from mistakes. Among other flaws, Evatt’s lack of self-awareness was both crucial and crippling. There is no doubt that the winner of the “great rivalry” was Menzies.

As a known partisan, Henderson runs the risk that her book will be seen in that light, and that her put-downs of Evatt’s admirers — “a collective of scribblers,” “the Evatt fan club” — will be viewed accordingly. Her failure to acknowledge any merit in Evatt’s referendum victory will seem churlish to some. But Henderson can’t be faulted on the book’s readability: it’s a one-sitting job for those fascinated by the politics of that era.

I was left wondering about the depth of the personal animus between the two men. Henderson quotes Menzies accusing Evatt of being too interested in power — as “a menace to Australia” to be kept out of office “by hook or by crook.” Prime ministers and opposition leaders routinely find themselves in settings where some form of civil, non-political conversation is virtually unavoidable. What on earth might these two have talked about? Well, both of them loved their cricket. •

Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $34.95 | 236 pages

The post Clash of the titans appeared first on Inside Story.

Many saw the election result as a tipping point, signalling that Australia’s longstanding and very stable two-party system was finally on its way out. Its dominance had been gradually eroding and, this time, more than 30 per cent of voters looked elsewhere to cast their primary vote. As it transpired, Labor won government with a majority of seventy-seven seats in the House of Representatives but a lower primary vote than it had achieved in 2019. It optimistically attributed this to “strategic voting” by supporters temporarily shifting their primary votes to non-Labor candidates deemed capable of beating Liberal incumbents. Labor polled exceptionally strongly in Western Australia, winning four seats from the Liberal Party.

While the Coalition parties made much of their primary vote being slightly higher than Labor’s, the Liberal Party also had a historically low primary vote. In other democracies, the Covid-19 pandemic shored up some faith in the “wartime” governments dealing with it, at least initially. By 2022, though, the same incumbency benefit was not enjoyed by the federal government in Australia. Nor did the lowest unemployment rate in almost fifty years save the government from defeat (or the treasurer from losing his own seat in Kooyong). Prime minister Scott Morrison, who had become the most unpopular Liberal leader for more than thirty years, was targeted relentlessly during the campaign. The “miracle” of his 2019 electoral victory, in the face of opinion polling predicting a Labor win, did not occur twice.

The longer-term trend in Western democracies — reinforced by the Australian election result  — is that the major (or traditional) parties can no longer rely on lifelong voters. The success of Australia’s teal independents reflected widespread reaction against major parties perceived to be operating in the interests of the political class and donors, and ignoring substantive policy issues — such as climate change — that mattered to Australians. Political scandals over sexual misconduct contributed to this disenchantment and to the increased salience of gender issues.

If the 2022 election could be seen as a watershed moment for Australian voters, the extraordinary events that transpired between the 2019 and 2022 elections certainly increased the importance of certain policy issues and voters’ critical stance on the government. The Morrison government, like its counterparts across the globe, faced the daunting task of dealing with a global pandemic. Significantly, the 2022 Australian election campaign coincided with a period in which the country had the highest daily infection rates in the world.

Climate change also loomed large in the wake of record-breaking bushfires and floods since the 2019 election. Between September 2019 and March 2020 the Black Summer bushfires burned an unprecedented 18.6 million hectares of bushland. “Once in a century” floods in March 2021 severely affected communities in greater Sydney, the Hunter region and the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and around Queensland’s Gold Coast. These events were repeated a year later, with severe flooding affecting Brisbane, the NSW Northern Rivers and Sydney. The Insurance Council of Australia reported almost 200,000 claims from the 2022 floods, or more than $3.3 billion in insured losses.

Despite the severity of these events, the theme of climate change was not prominent in the campaigns of the major parties, although the prime minister’s apparent lack of empathy with flood and fire victims became part of the negative campaigning against him. The Coalition government was particularly vulnerable on climate change, and its attempts to reframe the issue were singularly unsuccessful. One discursive tactic tried well before the campaign proper was that climate change would “ultimately be solved by ‘can-do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t-do’ government.” This attempt at free-market framing was no more successful than the ubiquitous “freedom” ads of the United Australia Party funded by billionaire Clive Palmer.

Voters were looking for alternatives to the two-party system and they were also engaging in politics in new ways, both online and offline, in the community organising of the “Voices for…” movements. The election campaign moved further online, and citizens creating and sharing memes were as visible as more traditional party efforts. Within this landscape the visual elements of campaigning were more important than ever. Digital disruption and disinformation — so prominent in 2019 — were also a feature, but so were more concerted efforts to deal with them.

Not only did the election bring a change in government; it also saw the lowest primary votes for both major parties and the election of the greatest number of independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the teal independents and the Greens, and the appetite voters showed for “doing politics differently” suggested the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.

A key outcome of the election was a widening split between the salience for voters and the salience for the major parties of long-term issues such as climate change and transparency in government. “Localised” politics, community campaigning and candidate quality were more prominent than in recent elections, in combination with the changing nature of campaigning in an evolving digital media landscape.

Another issue that unexpectedly took off was the Coalition’s broken promise to introduce a federal integrity commission. Integrity issues were highlighted by the teal independents and the Greens and, along with gender issues, became part of the negative depiction of Morrison that dominated social media. The Coalition unsuccessfully attempted to deflect attention from integrity issues by suggesting they were of no interest to ordinary voters and that the focus should instead be on cost-of-living issues and economic management — their usual electoral strengths.

Along with climate change and integrity issues must be mentioned gender issues, which were more prominent than in any election since 1972. The Morrison government’s seeming incapacity to deal with issues of sexual misconduct in the parliamentary precinct served as a touchstone for women’s disenchantment with the government on a range of issues. Veteran political journalist Paul Kelly was taken by surprise (and won a Gold Ernie Award) for his 2021 prediction that “the women’s movement won’t decide the next election.”

With so many high-profile ministers (and purported future party leaders) falling victim to independents’ campaigns on these issues, the Liberal Party faces the daunting task of rebuilding and — along with the Nationals — re-establishing its relevance with Australian voters, particularly women, socially progressive economic liberals and younger Australians.

The 2022 federal election also marked a profound shift in how the country runs its elections. A record proportion of voters cast their ballot before election day through either early or postal voting. While this trend was no doubt accelerated in 2022 by Covid-19, it builds on an underlying preference for convenience and arguably on disengagement from politics — with voters casting an early ballot to switch off from the long campaign.

With fewer than half of all voters casting their vote on election day, it appears that we have moved from an election day to an election period. This is a trend that is highly unlikely to be reversed, with potentially significant implications for the nature of elections as democratic rituals. It also has implications for small parties and independents because non-incumbent candidates can struggle to staff polling booths for extended periods.

The traditional media were criticised during the campaign for a seeming preoccupation with the performance of leaders and the possibility of missteps, with the hashtag #ThisIsNotJournalism trending on Twitter. In the very first week, Labor leader Anthony Albanese was unable to recall either the unemployment or the cash rates during a press conference. The government and the conservative media seized on the misstep to discredit Albanese’s economic expertise and cast doubt on his leadership abilities. But it also became illustrative of a style of politics that characterised the election: a focus on “gotcha” moments and detail from which bigger policy issues and debates were notably absent.

Having learned from the mistake of campaigning in 2019 on complex reforms (such as overhauling tax policy in areas like imputation credit refunds), the Labor Party focused on a slimmed agenda of manufacturing, wage growth, gender pay parity and housing. The Coalition responded by repeatedly emphasising its record of economic management, leading to what it described as “jobs and growth.” This dynamic left major policy issues prominent in the minds of voters — such as climate change — out of the contest between the major parties and in the hands of the Greens and the teals.

Despite the major parties’ best efforts to keep the campaign focused on preset announcements and policy agendas, significant events occurred during the official campaign period that challenged both leaders to respond in ways that were not scripted. These included the announcement of Solomon Islands’ security pact with China early in the campaign, which made regional security a significant issue, though not in a way favourable to the government.

On 3 May, the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted the official cash rate by 0.25 per cent — the first of eight increases during 2022. This was the first time since the 2007 federal election (when Liberal prime minister John Howard was ousted by Labor’s Kevin Rudd) that such an increase had occurred during a campaign, and it cemented economic management, the cost of living and housing affordability as key campaign issues.

Compared with other recent federal election campaigns, the 2022 election saw a heightened focus on individual candidates and constituencies. While all elections feature scandals involving candidates, the attention given not just to individual seats but also to the competencies of individual candidates was highly unusual. In part this focus can be explained by the momentum behind the localised campaigns of the teal and “Voices for…” independents, but it could have also been a broader consequence of the renewed importance of place and community that was felt so acutely during the Covid lockdowns.

The national media were captivated by the controversial candidate Katherine Deves, who was selected by Morrison to contest the northern Sydney seat of Warringah against independent Zali Steggall. Deves’s vocal stance against the rights of trans Australians was interpreted as a dog whistle to the Liberals’ conservative voter base. In other electorates, meanwhile, the suitability of candidates was being questioned based on geographic representation and appropriate reflection of ethnic diversity.

Labor’s Andrew Charlton and Kristina Keneally — both contesting seats in western Sydney — were caught up in these debates. Charlton — despite his political credentials as a former adviser to prime minister Kevin Rudd — was criticised for not living in the electorate. Former NSW premier and senator Kristina Keneally, also attempting to win a House of Representatives seat, was criticised in a similar way — but the party also faced strong opposition to the fact that it had not fielded a candidate who reflected the diversity of the electorate’s population. Independent and Vietnam-born candidate Dai Le ultimately won the seat of Fowler from Labor.

The victorious Albanese government got to work quickly, embarking at high speed on its election commitments, including preparation for a referendum on a Voice to parliament, legislation to introduce a federal integrity commission, and a jobs and skills summit. Both Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong embarked on international diplomatic visits to the Pacific region, to security summits in Japan and Spain, and to Paris to “reset” Australia’s relationship with France, which deteriorated after the cancellation of a multibillion-dollar defence submarine contract in 2018.

The government itself was more diverse than ever before, with a record number of women — including an Indigenous woman, Linda Burney, holding the Indigenous Australians portfolio.

Doubt continued about the legacy of the Morrison government. In August 2022, it was revealed that Morrison had been secretly sworn into multiple ministerial portfolios, including health, finance, home affairs and industry. He defended these actions as necessary in a time of unprecedented crisis and uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but his actions were widely criticised as contrary to fundamental principles of collective ministerial responsibility and open and transparent government.

While the implementation of Albanese’s policy agenda began with considerable speed, the economic context created — and will continue to create — significant challenges for the new government. Saddled with its election commitment to proceed with the Stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, the government faces an incredibly difficult mix of rising inflation, rising interest rates and falling wages. This will significantly constrain its fiscal policy options and presents a scenario for industrial unrest that could become difficult for Labor to resolve given its voter base and election commitments. •

This is an edited extract from Watershed: The 2022 Australian Federal Election, edited by Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer and Jill Sheppard and published by ANU Press, the latest in a series of detailed post-election analyses dating back to 1975. Contributors to the book — which can be downloaded free of charge — include Carol Johnson, Murray Goot, Marija Taflaga, Glenn Kefford and Stephen Mills, and Anthony Green.

The post Watershed election appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor’s Dorothy Tangney made history in 1943 when she became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate. But though she sat in that chamber for twenty-five years, no Labor woman ever joined her. Instead, she watched as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh women were elected to the Senate — all of them Liberals. And while Tangney spent her entire career on the backbench, two of those six Liberals managed to become ministers.

They hardly shattered the glass ceiling. But that first wave of elected Liberal women — six senators, along with Enid Lyons elected to the House in 1943 — were real pioneers, prising open the men’s world of parliament.

Who were these pioneering women? And how did they get there? Recent biographies of two of them, Dame Annabelle Rankin and Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, describe two very different women who took strikingly different paths to power and who, against the odds and in different eras, became ministers.

Rankin, a Queenslander who became the first Liberal woman in the Senate, served from 1946 and eventually became Australia’s first female minister; her biography is written by long-time Canberra journalist and lobbyist Peter Sekuless. Three months after Rankin left the Senate, in 1971, Margaret Guilfoyle, a Victorian, entered; she served until 1987, becoming a senior and powerful cabinet minister. Her life is told by the prolific Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute.

For both, the path to power, and the exercise of it required innovation, political smarts and sheer tireless persistence. But both operated within heavy constraints imposed on them by the masculine character of their chosen career. These biographies tell us important stories about the past that prompt good questions about the present: in particular, they stand as an implicit challenge to the present-day Liberal Party which, by its own admission, struggles to find and promote female members of parliament.

Annabelle Rankin came from a prosperous middle-class family in Queensland’s coastal Wide Bay region. Her father, a Boer war veteran, was elected to state parliament as a conservative; he then ran a colliery. The elder of two daughters, Annabelle later claimed in a well-worn anecdote that a childhood game had involved imitating her father “being a member of parliament. I would play that I was opening fetes and all that sort of thing and making speeches.”

Rankin attended the all-girls Glennie (Anglican) School in Toowoomba, and her path forward continued via women’s and girls’ associations as state secretary of the Girl Guides and assistant commissioner with the YWCA. But it was the second world war that made her, opening up leadership roles in two women’s paramilitary forces, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and the Australian Women’s Army Service.

Sekuless suggests Rankin’s constant travel and networking within local communities in these roles provided invaluable training for the future senator. Before long, her political potential was recognised and she was encouraged — by a man — to seek Senate preselection with the conservative-leaning Queensland People’s Party, or QPP (which soon merged into the Liberal Party).

In July 1946 Rankin, a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, found herself as one of two women and four men seeking endorsement for two QPP Senate spots. The gender make-up of the interviewing panel is not recorded, but one can assume a predominant male gaze. One of those present, state director Charles Porter, resorted to the language of love to describe the “splendid” impression Rankin made:

She was a strikingly handsome young woman, with a fine lot of auburn hair and she had this ringing clear voice, and she enunciated the principles that she believed in with such a fervour and dedication that was almost a passion…

She also wore her service uniform, which no doubt helped.

After making her speech to the panel, Rankin went home convinced she had lost, walked the dog and went to bed. But she’d won, and within days — a novice and a novelty — she was campaigning around the state. Her first rally, near her hometown at Maryborough, attracted 150, two-thirds of them women, and it was the women who led the cheering as Rankin outlined her political philosophy/strategy.

“I honestly believe,” she told the meeting, “that the need of a woman’s voice in the Senate is vitally necessary.” The audience applauded, and she went on: “For a number of years I have worked with women’s and children’s organisations all over Queensland. I have been honoured and privileged to meet and know so many women and men of our fighting services during my service years during the war years. I worked for those women and men during the war, and I want to go on working to help the woman and the wife during the years of peace.”

Rankin and her handlers carefully fostered her image: within a month, she was being widely described in the press as “our Annabelle,” creating what Sekuless describes as “a cosy familiarity” about her. She also carefully deflected questions about her decision to remain single. (Sekuless suggests there may have been a fiancé, who may have died, but he leaves it unclear.) In any event, Rankin routinely generated a high personal vote; in 1946, at third spot, she recorded twice the vote of the man at number two.

Rankin became the first female opposition whip, but was dumped when Menzies won government in 1949. Reinstated as whip in 1951 and despite tireless service, she was never promoted to the ministry by Menzies. It was Harold Holt who appointed her as the first female minister in 1966 (in the housing portfolio; Enid Lyons had been made a minister in 1949, but without portfolio — a deliberately toothless honorific).

Rankin then suffered the distinction of becoming the first woman dumped from the ministry (in 1971, by Billy McMahon). She quit the Senate in March 1971, reportedly in tears, and accepted as consolation prize another first — as first female head of a diplomatic mission (high commissioner to New Zealand).

The Belfast-born, state school–educated Presbyterian Margaret McCartney had few of Rankin’s social advantages. Night school at Taylor’s College led to accountancy qualifications, a corporate job, and a friendship with young RAAF veteran Stan Guilfoyle. They married in 1952.

Margaret and Stan quickly got involved in local Liberal Party work. Stan’s mother was a member of the Australian Women’s National League — one of the women’s organisations that later merged into the Liberal Party — and she had enrolled Stan as a Liberal while he was still in uniform; he was destined to be elected to the state executive.

Margaret became branch secretary in South Camberwell, set up her own accountancy business and produced three children. With the state’s Liberal Party division requiring fifty–fifty organisational power-sharing between men and women, Margaret steadily acquired influence and leadership in the Victorian Liberal Women’s section, the state executive and the Federal Council.

But these positions didn’t translate easily into parliamentary preselection. When senator Ivy Wedgwood, elected to the Senate for the Liberals in 1950, prepared to step down in 1971, it was Stan she first approached about replacing her; only when he demurred did Margaret come into the frame.

Even so, of the twenty candidates for Wedgwood’s spot, seventeen were men. Guilfoyle was opposed by the premier, Henry Bolte, and by a (male) member of the interview panel who asked her who would look after the children if she were in the Senate. An unimpressed Beryl Beaurepaire, another member of the panel, put the same question to the next (male) candidate. Guilfoyle won.

Guilfoyle became the third female Liberal senator elected from Victoria (after Wedgwood and Marie Breen) and the seventh overall. In opposition during 1975 she was one of the key Liberal senators, along with Reg Withers and Ivor Greenwood, who hung tough in refusing to pass Gough Whitlam’s budget, paving the way for his dismissal. Her reward was a senior position in the incoming Fraser government, becoming the first female member of cabinet as minister for social security (1975–80) and finance (1980–83).

As a young journalist in the press gallery I had the distinct joy of covering both the Senate and the social security portfolio. To visit Guilfoyle’s office was to undertake quite a trek: she occupied room M152, the most remote point on the southwest corner of the old Parliament House, accessed at the end of a long, gloomy, empty, creaking corridor.

The office was diametrically opposite the prime minister’s office in the northeast corner, and this seemed a metaphor for the way the Senate exercised power in those days — with aloof disregard for the hustle and bustle of executive government. There was no mistaking the silent sense of power in the air. Once admitted, I would sit with her private secretary Rod Kemp, who imparted as background a few carefully selected crumbs of news.

Henderson provides the broad context of Guilfoyle’s portfolio battles and crises, informed by interviews with former staffers and departmental officers, and analyses the complex way in which, even as a Fraser loyalist, Guilfoyle’s defence of her social security budget and turf managed to thwart the prime minister’s overall drive for reforms.

These interviews yield the gem that Guilfoyle’s always-assured and measured parliamentary performance was enabled by her “handbag statistics” — a notebook of key portfolio facts maintained by her department. But unfortunately we don’t hear Guilfoyle’s own voice; perhaps because of that same understated style, her Hansard is dull rather than daring.

These easily readable biographies form part of a series of short biographical monographs edited by political scientist Scott Prasser and published by Connor Court. Prasser describes the series as “scholarly rather than academic” — a very fine distinction that seems to mean narrative in form with clear referencing of sources. Fair enough, though a few of the “academic” virtues would not be out of place, such as a critical approach to sources and a more considered acknowledgement of previously published research (for example, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms’s A Woman’s Place: Women and Politics in Australia).

Neither author really probes the institutional obstacles and advantages facing these women. As becomes clear, though, both careers were at least partly subject to the will and whim of the (male) prime ministers of the day. Menzies fully recognised the importance of women for the Liberal Party, as a matter of organisational structure, political philosophy and electoral strategy. But talented women were routinely overlooked in preselections. And as PM he ruthlessly pruned the ministerial careers of colleagues male and female.

Rankin had to wait for her promotion until Menzies had finally gone. Fraser, by contrast, had to repay Guilfoyle’s loyalty in 1975 with portfolio heft in government; it probably helped that she was Victorian in a time when all but one Liberal prime minister had been from the jewel-like state.

Equally, it’s clear — though again, not analysed in either biography — that the political careers of these women depended heavily on the dynamics of the Senate. Fewer elections, longer terms and a less volatile statewide electorate helped to protect incumbents, including women. Once Rankin was in, she stayed in. A similar dynamic was at work in Victoria.

In fact, Guilfoyle’s replacement of Wedgwood was a watershed moment, effectively reserving one Senate spot in Victoria for women. (When Guilfoyle retired in 1987, she was replaced by Kay Patterson; when Patterson retired in 2008, Helen Kroger was elected; but the sixty-three-year line came to an end in 2013 when Kroger, from third spot, lost to Ricky Muir the Motoring Enthusiast — a perfect symbol of the decline of Liberals, and Liberal women, in Victoria.)

But these institutional explanations deny the agency exercised by each of these women in negotiating a narrow path into and through their male-dominated workplace.

After one setback in 1949 — when she was dropped as opposition whip — Rankin sought the comfort of Enid Lyons. Lyons told her that she would be accepted, “so long as you manage to do the work that men do and do it as well, and at the same time don’t antagonise them.” In remarkably similar terms, the newly elected Guilfoyle was advised by husband Stan “not to take on any responsibilities or portfolios that were women’s issues. If she was to make it, she would make it as a person like any man.”

Both women did indeed do “the work that men do”: long hours, late nights and mute persistence in hard slog. Both had a prodigious work ethic. It might have been harder for Rankin, a curio item in the 1940s and 1950s, than for Guilfoyle, who in the 1970s and 1980s was able to become a serious player. Rankin remained unmarried and lacked the personal support of a family; Guilfoyle had to negotiate a more complicated work–family balance.

But who would offer such advice to today’s female MPs? With unprecedented numbers of women in parliament, ten cabinet ministers, and teal and Green crossbenchers galore, the numbers have changed, thanks in part to Labor quotas. The nature of representative political work has changed as well. In today’s politics, does anyone (even a man) need to work “like” a man or “as well as” a man?

As for “antagonising” male politicians, Julia Gillard and others have shown that outing misogynists is a legitimate and valuable part of a female political career. But in an earlier era, it is notable that so many of these Liberal pioneers were rewarded — partly in tacit exchange for not antagonising the men — with the highest imperial honours. Rankin, Guilfoyle, Wedgwood, Lyons were all titled “Dame.” Even Tangney accepted one, though it was against Labor policy. •

Annabelle Rankin
By Peter Sekuless | Connor Court | $19.95 | 134 pages

Margaret Guilfoyle
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $19.95 | 84 pages

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As the party’s former assistant state secretary, Tony Barry, put it ruefully on Saturday night: “The Victorian Liberal Party is where hope goes to die.” Decades of infighting and election failure have hollowed out its membership, leaving it open to branch stackers and reactionary nutters. The Coalition as a whole has less than a third of the seats in the Legislative Assembly and barely a quarter of Victorian seats in the House of Reps.

Unquestionably, Victoria has become a stronghold of the left. But these days, so is Western Australia, and so is South Australia. Federally, so is Tasmania. Labor is back in power in New South Wales — and don’t mention the ACT.

In fact, if you look at voting over recent federal elections, Victoria, along with New South Wales and South Australia, is among the three states closest to the centre of the Australian political spectrum. The odd state out isn’t Victoria. It is Peter Dutton’s home state of Queensland.

Australian Electoral Commission figures

At last year’s federal election, the Coalition won 70 per cent of Queensland’s lower house seats but just 30 per cent of seats across the rest of Australia. Peter Dutton doesn’t need to go to Melbourne to be in alien territory; he’s in it as soon as he leaves his home state.

The Coalition is now down to ten federal seats in Victoria, but it also has just five in Western Australia, three in South Australia, two in Tasmania and none in the ACT or the Northern Territory. Even in New South Wales it is down to sixteen seats, or one in three.

The Coalition’s problem is not Victoria, it is Australia — or at least Australia minus Queensland. To write off a loss like this as due to being in hostile territory would be a huge, self-indulgent blunder that could only damage the Coalition. As the election results showed clearly, it has lost support in every other mainland state.

Yes, it would help if it could fix up the problems of the Victorian Liberal Party. But that can happen only if the federal and state Liberals use their time in opposition to rethink their policies — constructively, to ensure they are “sound and progressive,” as Sir Robert Menzies urged long ago.

This is renovation time. Both the Coalition parties need to remodel themselves into the kind of party that sound and progressive Victorians would want to be part of: the Victorian Nationals have shown the way. And that would similarly reinvigorate both parties in the rest of Australia. The Queensland LNP can’t be allowed to have a veto on federal Liberal and National policies.

Maybe only a Queenslander can explain one puzzling aspect of that state’s electoral behaviour. In Victoria and most other states, people tend to vote the same way at federal and state elections. But a lot of Queenslanders clearly vote different ways.

The Coalition has won a majority of Queensland’s lower house seats at nine of the last ten federal elections. At state level, though, it has won only two of the last ten. In the past thirty years, Labor has  spent more time governing Queensland than it has governing Victoria.

Labor has won all three of Queensland’s most recent state elections, averaging 51.8 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. Yet it has won only a handful of seats at federal elections, and just 44.5 per cent of the votes.

And that’s not new: it’s been a recurring theme in Queensland’s history, including during Labor’s long twenty-five-year reign from 1934 to 1957. Some Queenslander, please explain. •

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If so, he should have been playing on his home ground in Aston.  These were the outer suburbs of a generation or two ago, in Melbourne’s respectable southeast. Today it’s middle-income by Melbourne standards, but with fewer young university graduates than in the rest of town, and more older married couples.

Aston has more Anglo- and Chinese-Australians than in most of Melbourne — yet fewer migrants in total: 40 per cent of Astonians have two Australian-born parents. The 2021 census found 37.5 per cent of its residents are aged fifty or over, compared with 32 per cent in the rest of Melbourne.

Yet this normally safe Liberal seat, against expectations, rejected Dutton’s party and became the first seat in a hundred years to use a by-election to swing from opposition to government.

Dutton had flown down for the Libs’ election party on Saturday night, presumably because he expected the Liberals to win the seat. Albanese stayed away from Labor’s party, presumably because he expected Labor to lose it. So did I in my preview, and so did the bookies.

Other Liberals have privately raised their concerns over Dutton’s outer-suburban strategy. The Coalition now needs to win back nineteen seats to regain a majority in the House. There simply aren’t enough Labor outer-suburban seats within cooee of being winnable. The emphatic rejection of the party by Aston voters surely underlines the absurdity of its leaders continuing with business as usual rather than coming to terms with how the Australian mainstream has irrevocably shifted course.

Aston wasn’t a defeat, it was a rout. Every single polling booth swung to Labor. In 2019, the seat had the highest Liberal vote in Melbourne. This weekend, the Liberals won just three of the thirty-two suburban booths, one pre-poll centre and (very marginally) the postal vote. With just a residue of postal votes to come, the swing was 6.4 per cent. Combining it with last year’s election, the swing against the Liberals since 2019 will end up being around 13.5 per cent.

It was no show of support for Dutton’s strategy of defeating Labor by taking back the outer suburbs.

Dutton has taken responsibility, as he should, but also implicitly blamed the new moderate state Liberal leader John Pesutto, who during the campaign tried to expel far-right MP Moira Deeming from the state parliamentary party after she figured prominently in an anti-transgender protest attended by a masked group who gave the Nazi salute outside Parliament House. Internal party opposition forced Pesutto to water down Deeming’s penalty to a nine-month suspension, but was Dutton implying that his state counterpart should have just ignored the issue?

Yes, Victoria is difficult for the Liberals: the party has been moving right while Victorians, like most Australians, have moved left. When John Howard won power in 1996, the party held nineteen of Victoria’s seats in the House of Reps. Now it holds just seven.

The Howard and post-Howard generations have seen a steady loss of Liberal seats at federal level and what seems to be permanent opposition at state level. In Melbourne and provincial centres, it has ceased to be a party most Victorians recognise as theirs.

Even Howard’s 1996 victory saw the party lose Bruce and Isaacs, never to return. Bendigo went to Labor in 1998 and Ballarat in 2001. McEwen went when Fran Bailey retired in 2010, and Indi when Cathy McGowan pulled off one of the iconic victories in modern electioneering, running as a community independent against Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella.

Yet the Liberals still had fourteen seats going into the 2019 election. Four years later, half of them have gone. Labor won Corangamite and Dunkley in 2019, and the 2022 wipe-out saw Goldstein and Kooyong fall to independents Zoe Daniel and Monique Ryan, while Labor took Chisholm and Higgins. And now Aston.

(In every one of those seven seats, it’s worth noting, the new MPs are women, as were most of their Liberal opponents. You think there is equal opportunity for men seeking selection as Labor, Greens or teal candidates for winnable seats in Victoria? I’d like to believe it, but the evidence suggests otherwise.)

The Liberals now hold virtually no territory within fifteen kilometres of the city. Their seven remaining seats are made up of five in outer Melbourne (Casey, Menzies, Deakin, La Trobe and Flinders) and two in the bush (the southwest Gippsland seat of Monash, formerly McMillan, and the Western District seat of Wannon). And all but La Trobe and Flinders are now very marginal.

A quick diversion: we need to call out some widely circulating fake news, spread by Labor supporters, which has been reported as fact by the ABC and the Age. The source is the Australian Electoral Commission, no less. You’ve probably heard or read it: the Liberals now hold only two seats in Melbourne — because only two Liberal seats are classified by the AEC as “metropolitan.”

We’re entitled to assume that the AEC knows what it’s talking about, and usually it does. That’s why it’s inexplicable that its electoral classifications are so wrong as to be ridiculous.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, not the AEC, defines our urban boundaries. Five seats whose territory and people are wholly or overwhelmingly in greater Melbourne, as defined by the ABS, are defined by the AEC as “rural” or “provincial.” Three of them are held by Liberals.

Readers who know Melbourne can judge. These are the five seats, with their AEC definition, and their main voting centres:

Casey (AEC: rural): Lilydale, Chirnside Park, Healesville.

Flinders (AEC: rural): Rosebud, Mornington, Hastings.

Hawke (AEC: provincial): Melton, Sunbury, Bacchus Marsh.

La Trobe (AEC: provincial): Pakenham, Berwick.

McEwen (AEC: rural): Wandong, Doreen, Mernda, Wallan, Diamond Creek.

Yet other “rural” seats in Victoria are real rural seats: Gippsland, Indi, Mallee and so on. The other provincial seats are real provincial seats, covering Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong.

Do the AEC, the ABC and the Age really believe that places like Lilydale, Mornington, Melton, Pakenham and Wandong are not part of Melbourne, but belong in country Victoria? Get real, folks.

“Our brand has suffered terribly in Victoria,” Peter Dutton told reporters on Saturday night, and he is not wrong. The last time the Coalition won a majority of federal seats in Victoria was in 1996. Labor and Greens have won a majority in Victoria at the last nine federal elections. In that time the Coalition has gone from holding 55 per cent of Victorian seats to barely 25 per cent. To state the obvious, it cannot win back power without making big gains in Victoria.

But how? Dutton’s approach seems to be that there’s no need for him or the Coalition to change its brand; they just have to wait for Victorians to come around to their point of view. Last year’s election loss was a golden opportunity for him, as leader of the Liberal right, to unite the Coalition in facing up to all the key policy failures that cost it office: climate change, integrity, alienation of women, and a wide range of social justice issues.

The election of David Littleproud as Nationals leader gave him a potential partner for such an exercise, which would have been beyond Barnaby Joyce. And yet, on every significant issue that has come before parliament, or is about to, Dutton has chosen to be the voice of reaction: he doesn’t want to tackle climate change seriously, doesn’t want an integrity commission, doesn’t want a step forward on Aboriginal issues, and so on. He doesn’t want the Liberals and Nationals to move back into the Australian mainstream.

The Liberals like to call themselves the party of Menzies. After their federal election loss last year, the great man’s daughter, Heather Henderson, suggested in the Canberra Times that the party’s current leaders should study what her father actually said and wrote. I suspect she had passages like this in mind, from the Canberra convention which re-formed the Liberal Party in October 1944:

We have, partly by our own fault, and partly by some extremely clever propaganda by the Labour Party, been put in the position of appearing to resist political and economic progress. In other words, on far too many questions we have found our role to be simply that of the man who says “no”…

There is no room in Australia for a party of reaction. There is no useful place for a policy of negation.

In similar vein, Menzies wrote in retirement that while some, including close colleagues such as Arthur Fadden, believed “the duty of an opposition is to oppose”:

I do not share that simple belief. The duty of an opposition… [is] to oppose selectively. No government is always wrong on everything… To attack indiscriminately is to risk public opinion, which has a reserve of fairness not always understood.

An opposition must always remember that it is the alternative government… a quick debating point scored in parliament against some government measure will be a barren victory unless you are confident that, in office, you would not be compelled to do, substantially, what the government is doing.

I found that opposition provided… an obligation to rethink policies, to look forward, to devise a body of ideas at once sound and progressive… All of this, essentially work for the study [at the desk, that is], had to be done while the normal duties of active and campaigning politics were performed. It was not easy, and never will be. But it has to be done…

The duty of an opposition which wants to move over to the Treasury benches is to be constructive, judicious and different.

In another memoir, he explained why he and his colleagues decided not to name the new party the Conservative party, as in Britain:

We took the name “Liberal” because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, his enterprise, and rejecting the Socialist panacea.

That is what Menzies meant the Liberal Party to be — and what it was, more or less, for a long time. But the Liberal Party of today has become the “party of reaction” Menzies warned against.

We keep reading that Peter Dutton in private is not the blunt hardliner he appears to be in public. If so, as Menzies said, opposition is a wonderful opportunity to sit down in your study, rethink policies, look forward to the challenges Australia will have to face, and devise “sound and progressive” ways to deal with them. Just as Richard Nixon (one of Menzies’s greatest fans, incidentally) was able to break with longstanding US policy and recognise China precisely because he was a right-wing Republican.

This defeat is Peter Dutton’s opportunity, his moment to define himself to Australians. As Menzies said, it’s not easy, particularly while he is juggling the issues of each day and each hour. But it must be done.

We could remind him that there is another record in Australian politics that has lasted a hundred years. The last person who became opposition leader after his party lost office and then led the party back into office was Andrew Fisher, in 1914. And Fisher himself was the outgoing prime minister, and had lost office by just one seat.

Too many opposition leaders have failed because they ignored Menzies’s advice and become simply “the man who says ‘no.’” Peter Dutton is the latest. In that position, he is unelectable, and either he or his colleagues are going to have to do something about it.

Finally, a postscript on the NSW election. Since counting stopped on polling night, the two-party-preferred vote in the sixteen closest Labor vs Liberal seats has shifted the Liberals’ way by an astonishing 1.5 per cent. Terrigal and Ryde, two seats the ABC called as Labor wins on polling night, are now certain or probable Liberal wins. Miranda has gone from a narrow Labor lead to a comfortable Liberal hold. And the biggest swing of all has been in Kiama, where ex-Liberal independent Gareth Ward has come from 48.1 per cent on polling night to 51.4 per cent now.

This reflects a growing tendency for Liberal voters to skip the booths on election day and vote pre-poll or postal. The democracy sausage is primarily an icon of the left. The overall swing to Labor will end up closer to 5 per cent than the 6.5 per cent swing estimated on polling night. And that’s why Labor won’t have a majority in the new Assembly.

The Coalition will probably have thirty-six seats in the Assembly, down ten seats from before the election. That was a defeat, not a rout. It will start this term with a base strong enough to plan realistically for a return to office in 2027, should Labor fall short of what the public expects of it. •

The post Aston: the implications appeared first on Inside Story.

But yesterday’s result was a biggie, and it will end up being the third-, fourth- or fifth-largest swing since preferential voting was introduced in 1918. The other time a government took a seat from the opposition — one we’ve heard a lot about recently — was Kalgoorlie in 1920, with a more modest 3.5 per cent shift.

For political tea-leaf diviners the swing should probably be more important than the binary win–lose outcome. Had this been a safer seat it would have remained in Liberal hands. But the political class will interpret the result how it wants to.

As I noted on Friday, we can’t really know what motivated voters on Saturday. National opinion polls suggest a much more modest 2 or 3 per cent swing to the government. But the folks on Sky after Dark, taking up their usual theme, are convinced that Aston shows the Liberals aren’t right-wing enough. Peta Credlin even believes Liberal voters stayed at home.

The general theme elsewhere is the opposite: that the Liberals desperately need to move to the centre. This is obviously closer to the truth, but I prefer a more modest version: this and last year’s Victorian result show that conservative culture wars are not the secret to electoral success.

Being hung up about climate change was not the formula for the federal Coalition’s rule 2013 to 2022, and it’s not the formula now. Opposition leader Peter Dutton is a huge hit with a tiny proportion of the voting population, largely due to his forays into John Howard–inspired race-tinged divisiveness, but has never been a great fit for the general electorate. Voters are not repressed cultural warriors, agitating to break free and join the battle against wokeness.

On the other side, Aston voters were evidently not inclined to give the federal government a bloody nose. Anthony Albanese is not seen as “arrogant,” though whether that’s actually a good thing in the long run remains to be seen. A government not seen as arrogant is one that hasn’t yet made difficult decisions. You can’t put them off forever.

This result contrasts dramatically with Gippsland in June 2008, during Kevin Rudd’s first year as prime minister, which saw a 6 per cent swing to the opposition in similar circumstances (a sitting member, in that case for the Nationals, gratuitously retiring). Candidates are more important at by-elections than general elections — who will govern is not at stake, opening up space for other motivations — and Labor’s candidate in Gippsland wasn’t strong. In Aston, the Liberal candidate was a blow-in from the inner city and Labor’s a blow-in from closer-by.

Historically, by-elections haven’t given us any pointers to the likely result of the next general election result. The biggest pro-government by-election swing in history was 13.4 percentage points in the Australian Capital Territory in 1970, during the final term of the Coalition’s twenty-three-year rule. The second-biggest, 12.6 points in West Sydney in 1921, and a big 5.9 points in Maranoa in 1921, were followed by a national three-point swing to the Labor opposition at the next general election, although not a change of government.

A big swing to the opposition in Aston would have been seen as vindicating its general approach and inserted a spring into Dutton’s step. As it is, the very opposite applies. The Liberals’ whole strategy is wide open to question.

Might this even have repercussions for the Voice referendum? Dutton was already in the invidious position of manoeuvring a party room mostly strongly against it. Moves towards conciliation on this and other issues might be what the electorate would prefer, but Aston could also tighten the screws from within the party.

Political life just got a hell of a lot more difficult for the opposition leader. For some this might be a time to get out the popcorn. •

The post Battle lost, now for the war appeared first on Inside Story.

Menzies, aged seventy, is about to open a new telescope in the Canberra hinterland. Long experience of public speaking in the open air has given him an aversion to flies, and he has hit on the deterrent of shrouding himself in insecticide.

The young man is Tony Eggleton, thirty-three. Just hired as Menzies’s press secretary, he is ambitious, conservative and diligent. If spraying the prime ministerial personage is part of the job, he’ll do it obligingly and he’ll do it thoroughly. And later that day he will type up the incident in a note for his private file.

Here is a puzzle worth unravelling. Aren’t nice guys supposed to come last in politics? Yet that obliging young man ended up as top dog in the Liberal Party organisation. “Neither belligerence nor assertiveness were part of his persona,” according to biographer Tom Frame in his new book, A Very Proper Man; yet he became a prominent player in every twist and turn of the Liberal saga over twenty-five years from Menzies to Hewson: Holt’s disappearance, Gorton’s chaos, Whitlam’s dismissal, Fraser’s supremacy, Howard’s and Peacock’s failures, the Joh-for-Canberra fizzer. He was there through eleven federal elections, including a still-unbeaten record of seven as the Liberals’ national campaign director. And he went on to work at a high level in international affairs, in the Commonwealth during the Whitlam years and in the development assistance organisation CARE International.

Along the way, Eggleton practised a lifelong discipline of typing up notes recording his immediate impressions of events he was involved in. The result, says Frame, is “thousands of documents, memoranda, letters, newspaper clippings and photographs” in thirteen boxes, as well as a “personal chronicle” written by Eggleton for his family.

This remarkable trove of contemporaneous firsthand records sees the light of day for the first time in Frame’s biography. A Very Proper Man contains no startling revelation that reshapes our understanding of Liberal politics; but its deep detail, long span and central perspective will make it a very valuable resource for future historians of Liberal politics.

Frame declares himself a friend of Eggleton, and this is a friendly biography. But while it is thorough and substantial in tracing Eggleton’s progress, I don’t think it fully succeeds in explaining his success and longevity.

Born into a middle-class family in Swindon, England, in 1932, Tony (not Anthony) Eggleton left school at fifteen to become a reporter with the local newspaper. Rapid promotion led to an invitation in 1950 to cross the globe to join the Bendigo Advertiser. Supportive parents paid his passage; the adventure became a career. He joined the ABC in Melbourne the following year; by the end of 1954 he was an “A” grade journalist responsible for morning bulletins of radio news. Then along came TV, and Eggleton was included in the ABC’s first training courses — truly, as Frame notes, a “career-enhancing opportunity.”

When the ABC’s Melbourne office began a TV news service shortly before the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics, Eggleton was chief of staff. In his new role, his working life involved “identifying good news stories, assigning reporters and cameramen, supervising newsroom management and logistics, and assessing the film ‘rushes’ in the viewing room. With his office in a prominent corner of the newsroom, he was close to all the drafting, editing and production.”

And then he joined the navy, as its coordinator of public relations. Why? He had reached the top of the ladder in journalism at the age of twenty-seven; perhaps he saw a path into government, to a life among the news makers rather than the news reporters. If so it was an inspired gamble.

The navy minister was John Gorton, whom Eggleton had profiled for the Bendigo newspaper as a newly elected senator from Victoria. Gorton remembered him and liked his work — not least, perhaps, an opinion piece in which Eggleton had declared his support for Menzies’s proposed Communist Party dissolution bill. (“The local branch of the Communist Party is… an active tentacle of the Kremlin octopus… We must ensure the reds are prevented from infiltrating further.”) Gorton, the most junior minister in the government and not entitled to a staff press secretary, was hungry for profile and looking for someone experienced in the new medium of television.

Gorton overruled his department and offered Eggleton the job, and in March 1960 Eggleton moved to Canberra and into the Liberal orbit. They made a complementary pair: Eggleton initiated the now-standard practice of issuing ministerial announcements on Sundays, typically quiet news days; Gorton got increased coverage and was delighted. Eggleton also set up a navy film unit to produce professional newsreels of ships and sailors, and distribute them to TV stations. This innovation, too, has continued.

Frame, who has written extensively on Australian naval history, suggests Eggleton was perhaps too good at his job, insofar as his “effective promotion” of the navy may have obscured the problems that would manifest in a series of collisions and other fatal mishaps. These incidents culminated on the evening of 10 February 1964 when the aircraft carrier Melbourne collided with the destroyer Voyager. Eighty-two men were killed in the navy’s worst peacetime disaster.

Frame provides a terrific description of how Eggleton battled the bureaucracy to ensure “a continuing flow of accurate information” to the public, for which he received the respect of the media and, as it turned out, the prime minister. Menzies appointed him press secretary in late 1965 and allowed him to organise a live broadcast of the press conference in early 1966 at which the prime minister announced his retirement.

Eggleton was passed down, like a piece of valuable china, to the incoming prime minister Harold Holt. If Voyager was Eggleton’s trial run in crisis management, Holt’s disappearance in the surf off Portsea in December 1967 triggered his supreme test.

Thanks to his press gallery contacts, Eggleton appears to have been the first of Holt’s people to hear rumours of something amiss. He was the first to get to Portsea, travelling with Holt’s wife Zara. While the military and police conducted their fruitless search, Eggleton took control of the external story, filling the leadership vacuum and managing the maelstrom of media and public anxiety by personally conducting six televised press conferences over three days. He also communicated with the governor-general, the Liberal Party and US president Lyndon Johnson. In the process he became famous.

When the Liberal Party met in Canberra in January to elect Holt’s replacement, it was naturally Eggleton who announced to the media that the new prime minister was John Gorton. Gorton’s trainwreck prime ministership provides Frame’s most entertaining and astonishing chapter, informed by Eggleton’s contemporaneous file notes covering Gorton’s divisive and conspiratorial relationship with his staffer Ainsley Gotto, his hatred of the media, and his numerous domestic and international faux pas.

The highlight, deservedly, is the late-night drinks party at the residence of the US ambassador Bill Crook on 1 November 1968 — surely the most infamous and embarrassing incident ever in the Australia–US relationship.

Earlier that day, Crook had met with Gorton to confirm LBJ’s announced suspension of bombing of North Vietnam. The advice was tardy, annoying Gorton, who kept the ambassador waiting. That evening Gotto attended a dinner with others at Crook’s residence, and pressured Eggleton to persuade the prime minister to pay a visit to smooth things over. Gorton went to a press gallery dinner instead, and it was only late at night, well lubricated and in the company of a young journalist, Geraldine Willesee, that he agreed to do so. What could possibly go wrong?

In what now reads like soap opera, Gorton was miffed to see Gotto with another guest and Gotto was appalled to see Gorton with Willesee. Eggleton thought it was “incredible… unreal.” While music and dancing continued, Gorton at some point divulged that he wanted to withdraw Australian troops from South Vietnam but was prevented by Liberal Party policy. Crook invited Eggleton into the study for a private talk about Vietnam. Eggleton finally extracted Gorton “between 2am and 3am.”

Frame asserts that Gorton had “fallen short of every standard of acceptable behaviour,” and that when the story came out months later it was Eggleton’s personal reputation that helped save the PM. This seems fair. The Liberals were spending their inherited political capital like drunken sailors — or ex–navy ministers — and Eggleton proved himself the only adult in the room.

When Gorton was finally replaced by William McMahon in 1971, Eggleton opted to join the Commonwealth secretariat in London. He was lured back to Canberra in 1974 to help the Liberals, now in opposition, as the party’s federal director. In this role he worked very closely with Malcolm Fraser as PM, winning three elections, only to then lose four in a row to Labor’s Bob Hawke and retire in 1990.

So what does explain Eggleton’s longevity and prominence? Part of the answer is his loyalty to the cause. Hardworking, methodical, unflappable, an early riser and a non-drinker, he started out as useful and became indispensable.

Eggleton himself told a press gallery farewell dinner that as press secretary he had been “valet, chauffeur, decoy, bag carrier, sounding board and whipping boy.” He protests too much; he also brought exceptional skills in managing the news flow to suit his political masters, while also retaining the confidence of the working press. Veteran journo Alan Reid (providing Frame with his title) described him as “a very proper man.”

A further part of the answer lies with the old adage that proximity is power. Menzies disliked talking on the phone; he let Eggleton answer his calls. Gorton hated briefing the media; he let Eggleton do it for him. When Fraser campaigned, Eggleton travelled with him on the plane. Eggleton spent his career “in the room,” listening and learning and becoming, in the admiring description of another veteran scribe, Max Walsh, a “one-man intelligence network.”

Importantly, he didn’t seek to wield power or advise on policy outside his area of responsibility. He didn’t take sides and he didn’t blab. (A later Liberal press secretary, David Barnett, described Eggleton as like a built-in wardrobe — invisible and discreet.) Tact and discretion earned him the trust of those he dealt with and extended his influence.

At the same time, as he grew in experience and influence, he didn’t fail to perceive the benefits of centralised coordination of the government’s and the party’s communications. While still press secretary, he suggested the prime minister’s department create an office of public affairs and information to monitor and coordinate media units within the various departments and ministerial offices. In opposition, under Billy Snedden and later Andrew Peacock, he expanded the remit of the party office at the expense of the leader’s office.

Similarly, and more significantly and permanently, he secured appointment, under Fraser, as the Liberals’ first national campaign director, with effective (though often porous and conditional) control over the campaign activities of the nominally autonomous state divisions. Frame’s narrative is a bit light on here and could have devoted more space to the internal workings of the Liberal organisation and the personnel under Eggleton’s long regime.

As noted, this is a friendly biography. Frame’s criticisms, muted and elliptical, are largely confined to the introduction. He suggests that Eggleton should at times have “taken a stronger stand against bad behaviour” without specifying which incidents he is referring to. It seems clear that Eggleton’s tolerance of Gorton, especially his appalling behaviour at the US residence, is one of those occasions.

By today’s less forgiving standards, senior advisers become complicit if they put political or personal loyalty ahead of a higher responsibility to the nation or the government — especially if they are public servants, as Eggleton was at this stage. They have the option of calling it out, or walking away. Eggleton did neither.

Likewise, when Fraser blocked supply to the Whitlam government, Eggleton’s predecessor Tim Pascoe opposed the strategy. He even presented a memo to Fraser in October 1975 arguing that forcing an election for short-term gain would deprive Fraser of long-term moral authority. (Fraser burned the memo and never forgave Pascoe.) But Eggleton had no such qualms. In his own personal file note on 10 November 1975, he wrote that the governor-general would surely soon feel compelled to intervene; meanwhile, Liberal fundraising was ahead of target.

Such are the dilemmas and tensions inherent in the concept of political professionalism, which requires primary devotion to the client but also adherence to objective standards of conduct. It is only easy with hindsight. (For the record, I should note Eggleton’s generous consideration in giving me a lengthy interview for my doctoral research into the Liberal and Labor campaign professionals; he is indeed a very proper man.)

After he retired in 1990, feted and honoured, Eggleton worked in the aid sector with development assistance organisation CARE. Fraser, now chair of the global body, had invited him to apply to become its secretary-general. They travelled extensively and were an effective team, which suggests their close political relationship was based on solid personal sympathies.

Picture this then. A light plane touches down on a tiny airstrip somewhere in Somalia during the civil war in the early 1990s. Malcolm Fraser alights and, with him, a dapper and still obliging Eggleton. They climb aboard a convoy of jeeps, with a machine gunner for protection. Fraser, however, urgently needs to pee. There is no toilet, not even a tree. While Fraser unzipped, Eggleton was, in Frame’s words, “assigned the task of acting as a tree to afford the very tall prime minister a little dignity.” One can’t help admiring the man. •

A Very Proper Man: The Life of Tony Eggleton
By Tom Frame | Connor Court | $49.95 | 320 pages

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That would be a stunning swing of 8 per cent against Dominic Perrottet’s government — a government one could argue is the most progressive and competent the Coalition has produced in the past decade, certainly relative to its counterparts federally, or in Victoria or Queensland.

Four days later, a Resolve poll for the Sydney Morning Herald came up with roughly similar findings, though on those figures the swing seems to be more like 6.5 per cent. It would still be curtains. The bookies give the Coalition’s last government on the mainland just a 20 per cent chance of holding onto office when the voters deliver judgement on 25 March.

If that proves right, it would be a dramatic illustration of how far the Liberal Party has fallen. At its peak in 2014, the Coalition ran every government in Australia except for South Australia (where it won the election on votes but lost it on the seats) and the ACT (where it hasn’t won an election since 1998).

The Abbott government’s 2014 budget of broken promises marked the turning point. Since then the Coalition has lost one government after another.

Three of those governments fell after a single term. Six months after Abbott’s budget, Victoria led the way, following four years dominated by the Coalition infighting that brought down premier Ted Baillieu. Queensland followed two months later, with premier Campbell Newman, the hero of its 2012 election win, losing his own seat in a 14 per cent statewide swing.

The polls suggested Abbott’s own government would also be booted out after a single term, but Liberal MPs forestalled that by dumping him and installing Malcolm Turnbull to win them the 2016 election.

Coalition governments continued to fall: Northern Territory voters dumped the Country Liberal Party government in 2016, leaving it with just two seats; the following year Mark McGowan began his remarkable reign by ousting the Coalition government in Western Australia.

In South Australia, by contrast, the Liberals finally broke through after sixteen years in opposition to win power in 2018. But that government too lasted just one term, and Labor emphatically returned to power last March — two months before voters finally sent the federal Coalition on its way.

But the NSW Coalition government should surely be less vulnerable. While the Morrison government showed no appetite for tackling climate change, NSW treasurer and energy minister Matt Kean has been a national leader in pushing the pace of decarbonisation. No government in Australia is more subject to integrity watchdogs than the NSW government is to its own ICAC. And, with some exceptions (water, for instance), it has been more a reformist government than a reactionary one. On gambling reform, it is far more progressive than Labor.

But this election cycle has become merciless for the Coalition parties. They began it with seven of Australia’s nine federal, state and territory governments. They now have just two, and if the NSW government falls on 25 March, they will be left with just one.

It’s worth recalling that latest cycle, and what it means for the Coalition parties. South Australia’s Liberal government fell in March last year, the federal Coalition government was voted out in May, and the Victorian Liberals received another thrashing from voters in November. In 2021, the Western Australian Liberals were left with just two seats in the Legislative Assembly and the Nationals replaced them as the official opposition.

2020 saw Queensland’s Labor government re-elected with an increased majority, leaving the Liberals with just five seats in Brisbane. The Labor–Greens government was given a sixth term in the ACT, while in the Northern Territory Labor was re-elected for a second term.

The one victory for the Coalition in that time was in Tasmania, where former premier Peter Gutwein called an early election in 2021 and narrowly retained his majority. If Dominic Perrottet loses in March, Gutwein’s successor, Jeremy Rockliff, will lead Australia’s only Liberal government. He doesn’t have to face the voters until early 2025.

Being out of government makes everything harder for political parties. They have far fewer staffers to call on, few public servants to provide policy assistance, less fundraising power and a bigger challenge finding things out. Talented people don’t waste their energies on a party destined for opposition, so the opposition parties are left with rusted-on supporters and branch stackers’ recruits.

But cycles change. In the last years of the Howard government, Labor controlled every state and territory government in Australia. Then, with the Rudd government still at the peak of its popularity, Western Australians voted out their Labor government. Two years later Victorians did the same, and by early 2014 Labor had only two governments left.

The next political cycle began with the Andrews government taking power in Victoria in November 2014. If the Perrottet government is voted out, that cycle will culminate on 25 March.

But would that also imply that Labor is now at the top of its cycle? That it will be all downhill for Labor from here, and the Coalition will soon start taking back the governments it has lost?

Not necessarily. A looming Coalition revival would be a reasonable expectation if you assumed that its losses of government reflected cyclical factors alone: bad luck, changing political fashions, one-off factors, and in the NSW case, the wear and tear of twelve years in government.

But if that were so, we should be seeing signs of it in the state that was first to switch its allegiance to Labor. And those signs should have been apparent in November’s election there. As we shall see, though, there was little if any sign of a Liberal comeback.

It’s early days yet for the Albanese government. We’ve seen many governments enjoy an extended honeymoon before crashing — the Rudd government, for example — but eight months after the election, all the polls suggest it’s the Coalition that has lost a lot of ground.

Labor won the 21 May election with a tad over 52 per cent of the two-party vote. The latest Resolve poll in Tuesday’s Age/Sydney Morning Herald implied that the figure has jumped to 60 per cent since the election. Peter Dutton’s poll ratings remain far behind Anthony Albanese’s.

In this Labor cycle, the Coalition lost its first state government just eight months after reaching its peak of running seven of the nine governments. But the Coalition’s next cycle might not begin anytime soon.

After New South Wales votes it will be almost a year and a half before the next election anywhere in Australia, and then there will be a bunch of them: the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland in the second half of 2024, and then Western Australia, Tasmania and federally in the first half of 2025. While you’d think the Coalition will surely win one of them, it could face a long wait before its own cycle gets going.

Why?

First, since 2000, the Coalition has mostly been in government in Canberra, but Labor has dominated government at state and territory level. So far this century, in the states and territories, Labor has been in power for roughly three-quarters of the time, and the Coalition for just one-quarter. Outside New South Wales and Tasmania, Labor has become the natural party of government, and the Liberals/Nationals/LNP/CLP the natural parties of opposition.

In Victoria, the Coalition has been in power for just four of the past twenty-three years. In Queensland, three. In South Australia, six. In the Northern Territory, five and a half, and in the ACT, the Liberals have had less than two years in office and twenty-one in opposition.

Maybe that’s logical. The federal government’s main jobs are economic management, social security and foreign relations — and on two of those, voters have a conservative bias. The states, by contrast, are mainly responsible for running the services we rely on: hospitals, schools, roads and public transport. On those issues, voters have a bias towards improving services. Keeping the budget in the black seems to have gone out of fashion.

But former NSW premier and federal Liberal president Nick Greiner put it well when he said the Liberals’ problem is that its activist base is well to the right of its voter base. (Just as the Greens’ activist base is well to the left of its voter base.) And the longer a party is out of power, the more deep-seated that becomes. Failure breeds more failure.

Take the ACT Liberals. In its first twelve years of self-government the ACT mostly had Liberal governments. Red Hill pharmacist Kate Carnell was parachuted in to become party leader. She won two elections, presenting a moderate, modern face that Canberra voters could relate to. But in 2001, the Libs lost office, went into opposition, and stayed there.

By 2023, it’s come to feel as though the Labor–Greens coalition is the permanent government of the ACT, and the Liberals are the permanent opposition.

Could the same be happening in Victoria? There, the Coalition parties have won a majority of Victoria’s seats in just one of the last sixteen elections, federal or state. For a Liberal Party that once governed the state alone for twenty-seven years straight, defeat has come to be seen as normal.

The Coalition’s one victory was at the 2010 state election under another moderate, modern Liberal, Ted Baillieu. But in truth they were not ready to govern, were profoundly disunited and had no coherent agenda. When voters turfed them out in 2014, there was little to show for their four years in power.

Love him or loathe him, Daniel Andrews has been full of ambition to do things, above all investing in transport infrastructure and tackling cutting-edge social issues. In 2018 Labor was returned with a massive majority — so large that we all assumed 2022 would see a swing back to the Coalition.

That assumption seemed certain after the government’s mishandling of Covid. It imposed harsh, unpopular lockdowns that effectively closed down Melbourne for eight months, then changed course 180 degrees and dropped all controls as the death toll from Covid soared. More than one in 1000 Victorians have now died of the disease — 76 per cent more than in the rest of Australia.

Surely the 2022 Victorian election should have been the start of a new cycle of Liberal renewal. But no. At face value, the Libs made no progress at all. Labor had fifty-five seats in the old Assembly, the Coalition twenty-seven, and the Greens and independents three each. In the new one, Labor has fifty-six, the Coalition twenty-eight (assuming it retains Narracan at Saturday’s delayed election), and the Greens four. Labor won easily — and while the Nationals gained three seats, the Liberals went backwards.

But there are nuances to that narrative — and in politics, nuances matter. One reason why the Albanese government is riding so high is that it has the freedom of having a clear majority in the House of Representatives. But that majority came so close to being a minority.

If fewer than 500 votes in the relevant booths had changed hands, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance would have won the federal seat of Gilmore from Labor, the Greens’ Steph Hodgins-May would now be the member for Macnamara — and Labor would be a minority government, negotiating every bill with the crossbenches or the Coalition. Small changes, big difference.

For Victoria, nuance one: The pre-election redistribution of boundaries, on the Victorian Electoral Commission’s estimates, gave Labor a net gain of three seats (because Melbourne had grown rapidly, and Labor held most of the seats with swollen enrolments). That was the real starting point: so Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two. Not much difference, sure, but there was some movement the Coalition’s way, however inadequate.

Nuance two: As in the federal election, Labor was lucky. A shift of just 350 votes in the relevant booths would have seen the Greens take Northcote and the Liberals win Pakenham and Bass. Instead of the seats going from 58–26–4 to 56–28–4, they would have ended up as 53–30–5. Not much difference there either, but it would have shown clear movement from Labor to the Coalition.

Nuance three: On the votes, there certainly was movement. For the eighty-six seats contested by both sides at the last two elections, Labor’s share of the two-party-preferred vote fell from 57.5 per cent in 2018 to 54.8 per cent this time. That’s a swing of 2.7 per cent to the Coalition.

But in the twenty-five marginal seats — those where the election is decided — it was a very different story. The average swing from Labor to the Coalition there was just 0.3 per cent. The Coalition won four seats that were notionally Labor’s on the new boundaries (Caulfield, Hawthorn, Nepean and Morwell), while Labor won three seats that were notionally the Coalition’s (Bayswater, Bass and Glen Waverley).

(Labor also lost Richmond to the Greens and the Coalition won Shepparton from independent Suzanna Sheed. That’s why, in net terms, Labor lost two seats, and the Coalition gained two).

Mostly, the big swings to the Coalition were in safe Labor seats in Melbourne’s western and northern suburbs, where it had no chance of winning: seats like Greenvale (15.1 per cent swing to the Liberals), Mill Park (13.5), St Albans (12.4), Thomastown (11.4) and Kororoit (11.1).

Across the nineteen middle and outer suburbs northwest of the Yarra, the average swing to the Coalition was 7.1 per cent. But it won none of them, and even after those swings, only two of them were even mildly marginal.

To win a majority in the Assembly, the Coalition needed to make a net gain of nineteen seats. On the traditional pendulum, admittedly a rough measure, that required a swing of 10.4 per cent.

At the 2026 election, to win a majority, it will need to make a net gain of seventeen seats. On the pendulum, that would require a swing of 8.1 per cent. No opposition has gained a swing of that size since 1955, when Labor split in two.

The start of a cycle that will see Australia swing back to Coalition governments? I think not.

At this election, twelve Labor seats were marginal against the Coalition. At the 2026 election, only eight will be. Most of the seats it needs to gain to win office will need to be won by swings of 6 to 10 per cent.

These are normally classified as “fairly safe” seats. If Labor is still riding high with voters in 2026, they won’t be threatened. But if it loses support in the next four years, as governments often do in their third terms, some could come under threat. Labor would have far more territory to defend.

Nuance four: A significant development was lost in the focus on Labor’s triumph and the Liberals’ woes. This election saw the Greens almost double their territory. Richmond was the only seat they picked up, but they came close to winning five other seats: Northcote (lost by 0.2 per cent), Pascoe Vale (2.0), Preston (2.1), Footscray (4.2) and Albert Park (4.5).

One in ten seats in the Assembly, all in the inner suburbs, are now either held by the Greens or within their reach. That’s a position they’ve never been in before, anywhere in Australia.

In the Legislative Council, they now hold the balance of power, winning four seats, up from one in 2018. Labor will have to negotiate with them on any legislation the Coalition opposes.

Their first-preference vote rose just slightly, from 10.7 per cent to 11.5. But there’s a simple reason for that which media commentators ignored: at this election there were three times as many minor-party candidates as last time. Animal Justice and Family First ran in every seat, and the Freedom Party in most of them. Those candidates took votes from all other parties. As the table shows, the minor parties’ vote more than doubled, from 5.2 per cent last time to 11.7 per cent.

Note: while the independents’ vote fell by 0.6 per cent, the Liberals by 0.8 per cent and Labor’s by 5.8 per cent, the Greens’ vote rose by 0.8 per cent. They clearly did the best of the major players.

We can compare apples with apples by looking at the vote for the three main parties after minor-party preferences. The comparison is limited by the fact that only in twenty-seven seats were Labor, Liberals and Greens in the final three in both 2018 and 2022 and the commission distributed everyone else’s preferences between them. (The VEC has promised that this time it will eventually distribute all preferences in all seats. Thank you, at last.)

When just Labor, Liberals and Greens were left in those twenty-seven seats, the Liberal vote was unchanged from 2018. But Labor’s vote was down 3.2 per cent, while the Greens’ vote rose by 3.2 per cent. In the new marginal seats of Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston, the swing from Labor to Greens was three times that size.

But isn’t that just because the Liberals changed their preferences from Labor to Greens? No. These are three-party figures: the Liberal preferences hadn’t been distributed at this stage. And note: when they were, they didn’t change the outcome in a single seat, not even Richmond. As the VEC has repeatedly shown, most inner-suburban Liberals don’t follow their party’s how-to-vote card.

Where Liberal preferences were distributed, they lifted the Greens’ two-party vote by an average of 4.5 per cent. The Greens were slowly expanding their territory even when the Liberals preferenced Labor, but in 2026 that 4.5 per cent would make it far easier for them to keep doing so. And conversely, Labor would breathe a huge sigh of relief if the Liberals preferenced them instead.

In war and politics, they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Helping the Greens win Labor seats brings the Coalition no closer to government, as the Greens would always support Labor. But making Labor fight on two fronts dilutes its campaign resources: and of Labor’s thirteen most marginal seats after this election, in five its opponent is the Greens. If the Liberals redirect preferences to Labor in 2026, the only one Labor need worry about would be Northcote.

The Greens often declare war on themselves, and do or say silly things that discourage you from taking them seriously. But they have stood up for principles that matter to many Australians — tackling climate change seriously, treating refugees humanely, ending persecution of whistleblowers — which is why they have become the first party since Federation to establish itself as a lasting independent alternative to the two major parties.

The Country Party, now the Nationals, began as an independent group but abandoned that to form what has been a permanent coalition with the Liberals. In the last term of the NSW Coalition government, their one public stand on principle seemed to be to defend the interests of land developers against koalas.

The DLP and the Australian Democrats each lasted a generation and won significant support as independent alternatives to the two majors. But neither established a territorial base that could win them lower house seats, and eventually they withered away.

The Greens have carved out their own territory by making themselves the party of young voters in the inner suburbs. In those nine seats in inner Melbourne, they won 38.7 per cent of the three-party vote this time, ahead of Labor with 38.4 per cent and the Liberals with 22.9 per cent. At the federal election, they also won all three seats in inner Brisbane.

And the young, and the inner suburbs, just keep growing. It’s a good constituency to have.

New South Wales has become the Greens’ weakest state. At the federal election they polled just 10 per cent there, compared with 13.3 per cent in the rest of Australia. While they are now competitive in nine state seats in Melbourne, in 2019 they were competitive in just two seats in Sydney (Balmain and Newtown, both safe Green seats) and two in the hippie north of the state (winning Ballina, just losing Lismore). This state election will test them too.

For Victoria, the bottom line is that the Liberals have lost not only the 2022 election but probably the 2026 one as well. What happens then will be determined by the events of the next four years, and how voters respond to them. But things would have to go very badly for Labor for the Coalition to emerge with a majority.

For Australia, the bottom line is that if the Coalition loses what many see as its best government of recent years then it could be a long road back to power. And if the Greens’ MPs, senators and activists manage to avoid alienating their potential voters, it’s possible that the ACT will not be the only parliament in which the successor to a Labor government is a Labor–Greens one. •

The post The turn of the electoral cycle could be a long time coming appeared first on Inside Story.

Of course if he really, earnestly had questions about the upcoming referendum he could have picked up the phone to the prime minister, or quietly emailed him, rather than send the list to News Corp journalists and then the wider public. The Albanese government’s lack of preparation for the onslaught that followed was evident to all.

Some of Dutton’s fifteen questions deal with the proposed constitutional changes; most go to the subsequent legislation. One of them — “Is it purely advisory, or will it have decision-making capabilities?” — seems to have been answered ad nauseum, in the negative; it can only advise parliament. But the full answer might depend on what “decision-making capabilities” means — the decision to hold a meeting, perhaps?

Can’t give a simple response? Gotcha! Welcome to the politics of advocating change.

The chief problem these questions create for the government and perhaps all Voice advocates is that no one knows the exact answers to most of them. The Voice wasn’t the government’s idea; it came from the First Nations National Constitutional Convention, and the proposal was for a referendum to set up the mechanism, broadly, in the Constitution, after which parliament would thrash out the details via committees and public hearings including, particularly, input from Indigenous groups and individuals.

In the same mischief-making vein sits the demand for draft legislation — now! Of course, unilaterally pre-empting the consultation process would alienate Indigenous groups. It would be picked apart by opponents. It would just be wrong, and ultimately fraudulent, as the government could not promise it wouldn’t be changed, because of course it would be.

How many worlds can you have the worst of?

So Dutton’s “questions” have worked a treat — particularly among the Coalition’s favourite media outlet — with headlines about a campaign in disarray. (It’s not wall-to-wall disingenuity at News Corp; there’s a good summary of the issues by James Campbell in the tabloids.)

Still, the government’s best response would be to provide written, detailed, publicly available answers to the questions. Few will read them, of course, and journalists will still demand succinct three-sentence explanations and tut-tut about the referendum’s chances when they’re not delivered. But at least they will have something to point to.

Some are citing these recent developments as evidence that it was a blunder to propose a change that leaves the details to parliament. But the alternative, trying to define every nut and bolt beforehand, would have been even worse politically — a huge target for opponents to rummage through — and an inherently terrible idea, because like any public arrangements it will need ongoing tweaking.

And seriously, did anyone really think the federal opposition would offer bipartisan support? Expecting that would ignore the constraints within which Dutton is operating.

Right back when the two-party system developed in the second decade after Federation, Labor and non-Labor attitudes to constitutional amendments per se took hold at DNA level. I’ve written before, and again, that Liberal opposition leaders (as opposed to prime ministers) simply lack the authority to support Labor government referendums, even the most benign. A textbook case can be found in 2013, when a party-room revolt forced Tony Abbott to withdraw support for constitutional recognition of local government.

Sometimes the Liberals end up proposing the same (or similar) when they’re in power; see “Simultaneous Elections” under Labor in 1974 and the Coalition in 1977.

And the Voice is inherently more likely to provoke antagonism among Liberal parliamentarians, and more so among the membership. (And the Nationals, of course, have already nailed their colours to the mast.)

So expecting Dutton to go down in history as the Liberal leader who transcended partisan dynamics to reach across the aisle to support meaningful constitutional recognition, only to be later humiliatingly forced to backtrack by his fellow MPs, was always a fantasy.

The surprise is that he’s skipped to the chase so early, in the process catching the government off guard. On Saturday shadow Indigenous Australians minister Julian Leeser, a long-time advocate of the Voice, also castigated the government, criticising it at a Young Liberal convention for “not providing the detail” and preposterously adding that “they’re in danger of losing me.” He repeated the warning on ABC RN Breakfast on Monday, adding that he and Dutton were merely passing on questions people had asked them over summer.

It sounds bonkers, but again the realpolitik is unavoidable: Leeser’s leadership has embarked on a certain course and as part of shadow cabinet he must follow. What, again, is the alternative — generate headlines about division?

(By contrast, Senator Andrew Bragg, outside shadow cabinet and probably the loudest Coalition Voice supporter, wrote in the Australian that while he himself was “not confused,” he believes “a parliamentary inquiry should look at the referendum question, the amendment and the scope of the body or bodies to be legislated,” adding optimistically that it would “allow the legitimate legal issues to be investigated and the red herrings dismissed.”)

Actually, by showing his hand so early, Peter Dutton has done the government and Voice advocates a favour, dashing any illusions of an easy bipartisan path to voting day. It’s now obvious that the best that can be hoped for is the Liberals not adopting an official cohesive position.

(The Greens, it seems to me, barely matter. Their official stance will influence few of their supporters, and if they really do come out against the Voice it will probably be a net positive for its prospects in the wider electorate. And this discussion is about the campaign itself. I assume the legislation to enable the referendum will get through parliament one way or another.)

No one said this would be easy. Okay, some people might have been encouraged by opinion polls over recent years showing substantial majority support. But these involved pollsters contacting people, the vast majority of whom had never heard of the Voice, explaining it in benign terms and asking what they thought.

The past fortnight has reminded us that constitutional change is not remotely that easy. High support that crashes by polling day is a feature of, particularly, Labor government–initiated referendums. The Hawke 1988 government’s set of four went from 60s and 70s in May that year to September Yes votes in the 30s. As the No vote climbs, public figures jump on the bandwagon.

Okay, last year’s federal election showed that commentator pontifications about campaigns off the rails tend to be just so much bubble talk. But referendums are different from our lesser-of-two-evils two-party seesaw. It’s likely that the number of Australians who have actually turned their attention to the Voice increased several-fold over the last fortnight, and unlike the aforementioned opinion polling, their introduction to the topic was not favourable.

Indeed, a new poll in News Corp tabloids boasts “new polling showing more than two-thirds of Australians don’t understand the proposal.” The YouGov survey (actually of respondents only in New South Wales) found 46 per cent in favour, 30 per cent opposed and 24 per cent not sure.

The well-known referendum statistic is eight successes from forty-four attempts. The portion of Labor government attempts is starker: twenty-five attempts with just one success. Some of this history of failure is due to Labor’s propensity to be more ambitious, some to the electorate being more likely to be suspicious of Labor’s centralising plans, but overriding it is the aforementioned absence of bipartisanship.

It all ends up as a giant by-election, and we know what usually happens to governments at those.

It’s easy to snipe. I don’t want to be that negative guy. I can’t fault the “campaign” so far because it hasn’t really started, and it’s hard to know what else the government could have done. The opposition’s sudden quasi-No campaign caught everyone off guard. It’s early days.

I’ll be voting Yes because I respect the consultation process and the people who produced the proposal. In statistics alone, the gap between Indigenous Australians and the rest is dire and the status quo untenable. I don’t see our Constitution is so fragile that changing it threatens the edifice. This view doesn’t generate a totally blank cheque: if, for example, it really was a third chamber, with powers similar to the other two, I would run a mile, because in my opinion one of our chambers (the upper one) is already too big for its boots.

So, how to maximise the odds of success?

Labor’s only successful referendum was on “Social Services” in 1946, part of a set of three. It was held with the first general election for a new Liberal Party, led by the man who created it, Robert Menzies, and he supported “Social Services” but opposed the other two. Because it was an election campaign, his support (and opposition to the other two) was muted; he preferred to talk about the ghastliness of the Chifley government. In the end all three got majority national support but the bipartisan question received four percentage points more than the others, so clearing the double-majority hurdle.

Bipartisanship made the difference, but looked at another way it was only worth a few percentage points.

The Voice referendum’s best chance lies in its being held with the next general election. That’s how they should be done anyway, on logistical and cost grounds. It’s how the first three were put after Federation (two of them successfully) until a Labor government with very big constitutional ambitions developed the habit of midterm ones. Recent events have put paid to the idea that bipartisanship is more easily attained outside a campaign. Concurrent with elections, referendum proposals tend to be buried beneath the campaign proper, and people don’t overthink them. If this sounds cynical, well it is.

A big government win at the 2025 poll (itself not particularly likely) might drag the referendum across the line.

But this seems a forlorn hope, as the Voice vote seems almost certain to be held this year.

Comparisons with the 2017 marriage-equality survey are limited, because people held opinions on that for years, LGBTQI people have long been increasingly out, virtually everyone knows a few, often in the family, and that “vote” truly was about equality. But one stark feature was that almost three-quarters of eventual turnout took place in the first week of a six-week campaign. (Apparently postal-only elections tend to be like that.) If a scare campaign did indeed bite late in the piece, it was too late.

Its voluntary nature probably also helped the Yes side. Replicating those two features might be desirable. But how to do it without, well, appearing tricky?

Some advocates envisage a massive education campaign, but I don’t know how you force people to pay attention. An informed voting electorate would be a first; usually, it’s mostly about vague, half-informed vibes.

The 1967 experience, under a prime minister (Harold Holt) who had just recorded the Coalition’s biggest win since the creation of the Liberal Party and so enjoyed immense internal prestige, also doesn’t help us much. Labor, led by Gough Whitlam, campaigned for the Yes case (as he and his party did for Malcolm Fraser’s set of four ten years later). It was one of a pair, and less controversial than an ultimately doomed attempt to break the nexus between the sizes of each house of parliament. So, in a sense, the now more famous event was a bit like a referendum held with an election, relatively undiscussed at the time.

The important part of 1967 was kickstarting the Commonwealth “race power” to facilitate, eventually, land rights, Abstudy, ATSIC and a host of other special programs. But most Australians probably thought they were just excising constitutional discrimination.

That referendum fifty-five years ago did indeed take out all references to “aboriginals” from the founding document. But it left the ugly word “race” in there. That can’t be taken out (via referendum) without replacing it with something else — some kind of reference to the advancement of Indigenous people — otherwise all sorts of current legislation would become susceptible to legal challenge.

Add some sentences about First Nations people having lived on the continent and surrounding islands for dozens of millennia and you’ve got the minimal “recognition” model that was being spruiked a decade or so ago. It was rejected at Uluru because it would be merely symbolic. When Dutton insists he is in favour of constitutional recognition, it is presumably something like this.

Where is it written that the government is limited to just one referendum question? Holding two together, one for the Voice, another for recognition/taking out “race,” might at the very least throw a curveball at the opposition, and opponents more generally.

Political parties know that choices at elections tend to hinge on simple, often subliminal, messages and ideas. Campaigns are mostly about the horridness of the other side. A successful referendum can be seen as like a change-of-government election: people have been persuaded that the grass is a bit greener on the other side.

About a third of the electorate can be relied on to instinctively vote Yes to the Voice. Another group, probably smaller, never will. What do most (or all) of the rest think of Indigenous people? Through stereotypes, out of sight out of mind, often with a mixture of guilt and resentment. The “better angels” strategy would peck at the guilt. But perhaps Voice campaigners need to get real about what drives electoral outcomes: explain how the Voice will, yes, improve outcomes for Indigenous people, but more importantly why that is good for all of us, individually, in our everyday lives, and as taxpayers.

“What’s in it for me?” is, perhaps, the timeless campaign question. •

The post What’s in it for everyone? appeared first on Inside Story.

For Wild and other opponents of the Indigenous Voice, only one hope remains. Will the Liberals join the Nationals and campaign for a No vote? The widely held belief that referendums fail without the support of both major parties has given Peter Dutton’s Liberals an aura: when we know their position we will know the result.

The Nationals have already demonstrated how costly it can be to take a clear position on this referendum. Putting themselves in the No camp at the end of November, they immediately lost one of their MPs, Andrew Gee, to the crossbench. The National Farmers’ Federation, pondering the diversity of rural opinion, has since decided that it will endorse neither Yes nor No.

Will David Littleproud relish sharing a podium with Pauline Hanson at No rallies in the bush? He would certainly feel more comfortable with Dutton at his side.

Some see an implicit No stance in the letter Dutton sent to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 7 January, in which he asked fifteen questions about the design of the Voice. Until the government answers those questions, Dutton declared, the Liberals can’t say whether they will endorse Yes or join the Nationals and One Nation in the No camp.

While we puzzle over the parties’ alignments on the proposed constitutional amendment, we shouldn’t forget their common ground. Liberals, Nationals and Labor all agree that Australian governments need advice from an Indigenous Voice. The Coalition government committed $31.8 million in March last year to setting up such a body; it then lost office to a Labor Party that promised to defer creating an Indigenous Voice until after a referendum confirms that the electorate wants it embedded in the Constitution.

Since the change of government, both Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Peter Dutton have declared that Labor should legislate now, rather than waiting for a referendum, if it believes in the Voice.

So what is the underlying, longer-term debate about the Voice really about? In essence, the major parties differ on two questions. First, what form should constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians take? Both sides say they want the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians in some way, but the conservative parties insist that enshrining the Voice in the Constitution is a bad way to do it.

Then there’s the design of the Voice itself. Labor insists that this discussion be deferred until after the referendum, when parliament will consider a yet-to-be-written bill. Others want to start the design conversation now. Even those on the right who want to see the referendum carried — people like legal scholar Greg Craven, Liberal MPs Julian Leeser and Andrew Bragg, and journalist Chris Kenny — have either raised questions about the shape of the Voice or asked for the government to publish a draft bill.

These questions have exasperated many of the people committed to voting Yes in Labor’s referendum. Asking the government to detail the form and functions of the Voice is bad faith, they say; the Liberals are needling the Yes campaign without defining their own stance. They fear that to answer every question now will plunge supporters of Yes into dispute with each other, and that some Yes voters, not liking the answers, will defect to No.

Dutton undoubtedly profits by continuing to ask questions about Voice design. He can avoid alienating Liberals who want a constitutionally enshrined Voice while keeping at bay the Liberals who, for a variety of reasons, would like to join the Nationals in the No camp. But characterising his questioning as a political tactic is persuasive only up to a point. What it overlooks is the fact that a debate about Voice design is already under way — a debate that some wish to suppress for now, and others wish to join.

From the Liberals’ point of view, creating a debate about Voice design makes sense, no matter what position they take on the referendum. A legislated Voice is likely, whether or not the Yes case wins, because both Labor and the Coalition want one. The conservatives are seeking Labor’s commitment to a Voice of a certain kind — a Voice that resembles, in some respects, the body that they began to design in 2016 (by some accounts, as long ago as 2013).

Dazzled by the apparent belligerence of Dutton’s 7 January letter to Albanese, some commentators have not noticed the punches it pulled.

Many on the right — journalists Peta Credlin, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and Greg Sheridan, for instance, and former PMs Abbott and Howard — have been publicly counselling Dutton to oppose the Voice as a “race-based” assault on liberal equality. Yet Dutton’s questions made no appeal to a principle of formal equality and avoided the “race-based” tag.

Nor did he raise the threat to parliamentary sovereignty some believe would be posed by the High Court. Anti-Voice conservatives have asserted that Albanese’s constitutional amendment — no matter how cleverly worded — will encourage litigation. Litigants will demand and receive the High Court’s help in intensifying the government’s obligation to listen and respond to the Voice and to license it to choose whatever matter it wishes to speak on.

Instead of taking up these fears, Dutton’s letter and questions essentially linked the effectiveness or otherwise of the Voice to its representativeness.

His first three questions concerned who can vote for and serve on the Voice. Questions four, nine and ten were about election/appointment and ongoing accountability. Question eleven named a constituency that the Voice must be designed to represent: “those who still need to get a platform in Australian public life.”

Questions twelve and fifteen hinted at what the Voice should be concerned with (closing the gap and “the real issues that impact people’s lives daily on the ground in the community”); question thirteen invited the government to assure us that the Voice would not negotiate a treaty.

Dutton’s polemical phrasing stoked anxiety about several questions. But they are nonetheless matters of structure and purpose, and they embody an underlying idea: that the Voice will not help the most disadvantaged unless it is designed to amplify their influence on governments.

So it is significant that Dutton’s fourteenth question linked this ethically attractive idea to an actual design proposal: “Will the government commit to Local and Regional Voices, as recommended in the report on the co-design process led by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton?”

That is a confronting question for Labor, which has sought to say as little as possible about Calma and Langton’s report since it was released in December 2021. Albanese said immediately after his Garma speech that the report was central to his government’s thinking, but neither he nor Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney has revealed which features of the model the government does and doesn’t like. Albanese’s recent radio interview with Ben Fordham revealed that he does not have some features of the Calma–Langton model at his fingertips.

The plan for Patrick Dodson, chair of the joint parliamentary committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, to circulate a substantial outline of the Voice by Christmas 2022 seems to have been dropped, though it has been minimally fulfilled by Burney’s listing of several design principles: that the Voice will be advisory, will not deliver programs, will not have a veto over parliament, will be “accountable and transparent,” will be chosen by First Nations people, will be gender-balanced and will include young people.

Calma and Langton went much further than this. In particular, they presented the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices as the foundational tier of the Voice, and argued that this tier must thus be created first. Only when the “vast majority” of Local and Regional Voices are in place, they said, will it be possible for the National Voice to be added — perhaps two years after work on the Local and Regional Voices had begun. (Until then, they suggested, there would be an Interim National Voice.)

It made sense to defer the National Voice, they pointed out, because its members should be chosen by the Local and Regional Voices rather than by the votes of a national Indigenous electorate. In Calma and Langton’s conception, the National Voice gets its representative legitimacy from the Local and Regional tiers that precede it and on which it depends.

Calma and Langton say that the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices will not arise de novo but should build on and extend “existing local and regional decision-making arrangements.” As examples they mention the NSW Local Decision Making initiative and the national Empowered Communities scheme — the latter giving their plan a conservative lineage, for it was established by the Turnbull government in 2016.

Empowered Communities sought to cultivate “partnerships” between government and community in eight regions: Cape York, NSW Central Coast, Inner Sydney, Goulburn Murray, East Kimberley, West Kimberley, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and Ngarrindjeri. The scheme analysed data, built “baselines” and identified “service delivery gaps” in order to produce “long-term Regional Development Agendas.”

In some of the Empowered Communities the Morrison government quarantined welfare payments through the Cashless Debit Card. When Labor abolished the CDC in September 2022, some critics argued that the government had failed to heed the wishes of many in those regions.

Within the Turnbull and Morrison governments, Empowered Communities were seen as promising exercises in forming what Calma and Langton would come to call Local and Regional Voices. But Liberal MP Tim Wilson doubted in August 2018 that anything would be gained from giving constitutional recognition to such bodies: they got their legitimacy, he asserted, from their representativeness.

By the time the Coalition’s Aboriginal Australians minister Ken Wyatt convened his co-design committees in early 2020, the Morrison government seemed to be anticipating that the regional structures of the Voice would resemble and build on the “partnership” forums of the Empowered Communities program. Empowered Communities were among the seeds from which Calma and Langton expected Local and Regional Voices to grow. But Wyatt’s terms of reference prevented them from advocating for their model of the Indigenous Voice to be constitutionally enshrined.

Only a few months before the Morrison government lost office, Calma and Langton were arguing that the Voice should be legislated so that voters would get to know it as a useful rather than threatening part of Indigenous politics before any constitutional referendum. Wyatt didn’t get his wish to legislate on the basis of their report, but Langton publicly welcomed the last Coalition budget’s allocation of money towards what Wyatt called “more detailed co-design of implementation requirements for each jurisdiction” so that Local and Regional Voices could be formed.

As Australia passed from Coalition to Labor rule, the conservative provenance of the Calma and Langton model made referring to it politically awkward. Calma and Langton have continued to promote it, but they have adjusted their advocacy to the new sequence: their report is to be read now but acted on only after the referendum.

Without dismissing it, some advocates of a Yes vote treat the Calma–Langton model with great reserve. The co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue, Megan Davis, subtly distanced herself by referring to it as “the Wyatt report.” “There are many useful aspects of the Wyatt report that will inform the way forward,” she wrote in July 2022.

Davis’s wariness about the “Wyatt report” would be evident to anyone who noticed how Calma and Langton had responded to her proposal to the co-design committee that the National Voice have the “powers and privileges of a parliamentary committee to compel people to appear as witnesses or produce documents.” Reporting to a conservative government, Calma and Langton had thought it prudent to label that an “inquisitorial” approach and to suggest that a “good-faith partnership” was a better option.

The feature of the Calma–Langton model that (probably) endeared it most to the Morrison government was the emphasis on the Local and Regional tier: the thirty-five Voices that would speak to state, territory and local governments about programs and development opportunities.

But in the eyes of some who want an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the Calma–Langton model does not show how regions can be represented. In the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2022, lawyer Teela Reid wrote that “each First Nation ought to have input” and therefore that “First Nations people want a nation-based Voice.” She described as “artificial” the local, regional and state boundaries “endorsed in the government report into the Voice co-design process by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.”

A month later, Davis and fellow lawyers Gabrielle Appleby and Sean Brennan released a paper, “Finalisation of the Voice Design,” in which they acknowledge the persistence of public demands for more information about the Voice. While referring respectfully to the Calma–Langton report, their paper warns us not to consider as “final” the model it produced. They have “process-related concerns” about the report.

Appleby, Brennan and Davis want to rule a line under all the design thinking done during the Coalition government and enunciate design principles reflecting the possibility of the Voice being a constitutionally based body. In particular, they depart from Calma and Langton’s emphasis on the Local and Regional tier.

“The Voice is primarily a Voice to Parliament,” they write, “informing the ultimate national law-making authority, but it must also be engaged with government in the development of policies and legislative proposals” (my emphasis). They also want the government and parliament to have “an obligation to engage with the Voice in certain defined areas” (my emphasis).

Appleby, Brennan and Davis observe that no report has ever outlined a body that — by virtue of the referendum — is to be a constitutional entity giving Indigenous Australians constitutional recognition. This unprecedented design task, they say, requires significantly augmenting the work of parliament by a process of Indigenous consultation. They outline their preferred process and argue it should be “set out in a bill that is passed by parliament and (in an uncommenced form) is an Act available to the public voting at the referendum” (my emphasis).

Under this legislation an appointed Voice Design Council, guided by an Indigenous Steering Committee, would conduct regional dialogues at which First Nations delegates would deliberate on the design of the First Nations Voice. These dialogues would culminate in a National Convention that would write drafting instructions for the bill. The Indigenous Steering Committee would then work with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel to draft the bill. A joint parliamentary committee would consider public submissions and then recommend to parliament that it pass the final bill.

The Albanese government has not commented on this proposal for a post-referendum design process, but it continues to promise “consultation” before it presents a bill to parliament. Without disputing that parliament will write the Voice legislation, Appleby, Brennan and Davis have spelled out who should be consulted and the form that “consultation” would take: “Sufficient assurance must be given to First Nations people that the design of the Voice… will not be imposed on them by the parliament without their input.” That assurance, they say, should take the form of an act of the parliament.

By proposing a post-referendum “consultation” process that resembles the dialogues orchestrated by the Referendum Council in 2016 and 2017, Appleby, Brennan and Davis are hoping that the process that produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart is widely respected. They are banking on the possibility that the 2016–17 sequence of regional dialogues and its crowning national assembly has become paradigmatic of the Indigenous public.

“Recognition” implies there is such a thing as an Indigenous public that can accept or decline the proposed terms of recognition. But the “Indigenous public” is no more than a rhetorical construct unless it finds credible institutional expression. Until there is a Voice, this is what the series of Indigenous assemblies can be. Indigenous assemblies are currently the only political technology that can credibly answer the question: in what terms do Indigenous Australians want to be recognised?

In laying out their preferred post-referendum process, Appleby and her colleagues give less emphasis to the law-making sovereignty of the parliament, though they don’t dispute it. Their bid to write Indigenous assemblies into the post-referendum design process asserts an Indigenous prerogative we are at risk of not making room for: the prerogative to say yes or no to the offered recognition.

For “recognition” to be effective, the recognised must determine its terms. Appleby, Brennan and Davis are reminding us that this amendment, unlike any constitutional amendment in Australia’s history, will work only if it empowers an Indigenous interlocutor to say whether the recognition afforded by Australian voters is a recognition worth having.

Australians’ evident willingness to recognise Indigenous Australians in some way has empowered those to be recognised. The current diversity of viewpoints among Indigenous figures (Price, Davis, Lidia Thorpe, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and others) may dismay some as a cacophony. But the fact that Indigenous Australians are now disputing with one another about what would be recognition’s optimal form is one manifestation of their empowerment as the soon-to-be-recognised.

Mundine has spent the past twelve years letting us know his reservations about constitutional recognition, and about the Voice in particular. But he has also said recently that if the Voice is established he will contribute to making it work in order to get government “off our backs.”

Lidia Thorpe wants a truth-telling process, a treaty that recognises sovereignty and then — only then — a Voice, but we can be sure that if a Voice is established first she will assess its usefulness to her sovereignty agenda. With her strong commitment to women and children, Jacinta Price is unlikely to neglect a Voice as a means of formulating social policy — including (possibly) a revival of something like the Cashless Debit Card.

When Labor faces Liberals’ demands for detail — as it is likely to do right up until the day of the referendum — it will have to summon the nerve to continue offering only broad answers. A minimalist approach to releasing “details” will allow for a post-referendum process of further Indigenous deliberation about what kind of Voice is wanted.

While Linda Burney has mostly shown the stomach for minimalism, she has sometimes sought to appease questioners by assuring them that the Voice will deal with education, health, housing, domestic violence, childcare, native title, land rights, cultural water allocations, and other policies that have a “direct effect” on Indigenous Australians — and not “things like taxation or defence.” I suspect that her Indigenous advisers — especially Davis — have warned her against sliding into such pre-emptive talk.

Meanwhile, invoking the voters’ right to know what they are voting on, Dutton and others will solicit all the pre-emption they can get. Their pressure was evident in Julian Leeser’s announcement on Saturday that his support for Yes is weakening in the absence of Labor’s answers to Dutton’s questions. The Coalition parties will store up every “detail” they extract so they can point to it after the referendum as a design feature already endorsed (or rejected) by the Australian public.

The politics of Voice design has already begun. Whether the Liberals decide on a Yes, No or “free vote” approach to the referendum, the one thing that matters to conservatives now is to concede as little as possible of the Voice design process to those who seek to be recognised. •

The post Peter Dutton’s questions appeared first on Inside Story.

“Get your hands off me,” an angry photographer in a pink shirt snarls at a television reporter. Punches are thrown. Blood spurts from the nose of a radio journalist. “Come on, simmer down,” people shout. Someone warns the pink-shirted troublemaker: “This is going all over the country, you know.” More punches are thrown. “Go to buggery, punk,” the photographer screams at a member of the ABC crew. “This is not the ABC studio.”

One of the Labor Party’s public relations team, David White, is pleading with the mob to “ease back, make room for the camera.” Tony Whitlam, the six foot five inch son of the Labor leader, moves in to try to break up the scuffles. He is patient at first, then he flushes angrily and clenches a fist. A Whitlam aide, Richard Hall, places a hand on his shoulder and says, “Easy, Tony.” David White motions to a rather large member of the Canberra press corps and whispers, “Stand in the doorway and look imposing while I get some policemen.”

Inside the house, oblivious to the violence on the patio, Gough Whitlam and his wife, Margaret, are cutting a victory cake. In the icing are the words “Congratulations Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister, 1972.” The party workers sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” but the noise from the garden drowns them out.

“We should have thought of barricades,” mutters Richard Hall, as he and other members of the Whitlam staff hurriedly make new arrangements for the prime minister–elect to face the television cameras inside, away from the mob. Party guests are cleared from the sunroom. The big ABC camera is lifted through the door. Lights are set up. Mrs Whitlam appears and is questioned by radio and TV men, but her answers are inaudible more than a few feet away. Whitlam’s driver, Bob Miller, fights his way through the crush with a white piano stool for his boss to sit on.

About forty media people are packed into a room that measures no more than twenty feet by fifteen feet — together with the TV camera, the lights, the microphones. The heat is overwhelming. Television reporters sweat under their make-up. Then, at 11.27pm, Gough Whitlam squeezes along the passage and takes his place on the stool.

Radio reporters lunge at him with microphones as he begins to speak. “All I want to say at this stage is that it is clear that the majority given by New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania is so substantial that the government will have a very good mandate to carry out all its policies. These are the policies which we have put in the last parliament, and throughout the campaign we did not divert from them, we were not distracted from them, and we are very much reassured by the response the public gave to our program… We are, of course, very much aware of the responsibility with which the people have now entrusted us.”

The TV and radio men begin to fire questions about the actions he plans as prime minister, but he stops them. “I can’t go on answering questions like this… I have to wait for a call from the governor-general.” But it is enough. He has claimed victory, and now he moves out into the garden to mingle with Labor supporters, friends and neighbours who have attended similar parties at the unimposing Whitlam house in Albert Street, Cabramatta, every election night since he moved there in 1957.

Twenty-five miles away, at Drumalbyn Road, Bellevue Hill, a far grander residence in a far grander suburb, William McMahon has watched the Whitlam performance on television. He had been about to go outside to face the cameras himself, but now he must wait another ten minutes or so. Early that afternoon one of his press officers, Phillip Davis, anticipating a Labor win, had drafted a statement conceding defeat. At 10pm he and speechwriter Jonathon Gaul had retired to the family room in the McMahon home to dictate a final version to a stenographer.

Now McMahon reads it over, scribbling in a note at one point to “thank government supporters.” Then he says, “All right, let’s get it over with.” A staff member asks if he is sure he knows what he is going to say, and he nods. Davis asks Mrs Sonia McMahon if she minds accompanying her husband. “Nothing would stop me going out with him,” she says.

Outside the door are the cameras and a tunnel of pressmen. To the right nearly 200 well-wishers — neighbours, party supporters, curious sightseers — are gathered. McMahon walks out. His wife, looking strained but dry-eyed, follows. “Mr Whitlam has obviously won and won handsomely,” says the politician who has led the Liberal–Country Party Coalition to its first defeat for twenty-three years.

“There can be no doubt about the trend in New South Wales and Victoria, and they show a decisive majority for him. I congratulate him, and I congratulate his party, too. For my own part, I accept the verdict of the people as I always would do… Mr Whitlam must also accept the fact that we are an opposition that will stick to our Liberal principles and will give him vigorous opposition whenever we feel that he is taking action which is contrary to the interests of the Australian people.”

He thanks those who voted for the Coalition, and then adds, “Above all, I want to thank my own staff who have been driven relentlessly over the last few months and have stuck with me, they’ve helped me, and they’ve never wilted under the most heavy and severe oppression.” Finally: “The election is gone, it is over, and Mr Whitlam is entitled to be called upon by the governor-general to form a government.”

It has been a dignified statement, delivered with scarcely a tremor in his voice. The man who has gone through an election campaign reading speeches from an autocue has departed from his prepared text, and improved on it. He has been more generous in his references to his opponents than Davis and Gaul had been. The appreciative remarks about his staff are totally unscripted, coming as a shock to people who in the past have felt themselves to be little more than numbers to their employer.

McMahon refuses to answer questions on the reasons for the Coalition’s defeat. “That’s something for deep consideration,” he tells the reporters. Then he turns away and, with Mrs McMahon, plunges into the crowd clustering around the wrought-iron double gates and across the gravel driveway. For several minutes his diminutive figure is lost from sight as he moves among the well-wishers, shaking hands and accepting condolences.

Gough Whitlam and William McMahon spent polling day, Saturday 2 December 1972, touring booths in their electorates. There are forty-one booths in the sprawling electorate of Werriwa in Sydney’s outer-western suburbs, and Whitlam, accompanied by his wife and the Labor Party’s radio and television expert, Peter Martin, visited all of them.

Mr McMahon, too, visited all thirty-three booths in his seat of Lowe, not far away but closer to the city. On his way home he dropped in on several booths in Evans, one of the marginal seats the Liberals feared they would lose. The sitting Liberal member, the navy minister Dr Malcolm Mackay, was one of his closest supporters, and McMahon wanted to help him if he could, even at that late stage. Then McMahon returned to Bellevue Hill, had a swim in his pool and settled down to wait with his staff and a few friends. Whitlam went back to Cabramatta to prepare for the party.

The Whitlam election night party is by now a tradition in Werriwa. For several months before the 1972 election, members of Whitlam’s staff — particularly his press secretary and speechwriter Graham Freudenberg — had been trying to persuade him to change the venue, to hold it at a club or a hotel. With a Labor victory likely, they foresaw security problems.

The crowd, they warned, would be too big for the small cottage and its pocket-handkerchief garden. But Whitlam insisted the function would be held at the house as usual. The party workers in the electorate expected it, he said, and that was that. But he made one concession. He agreed that, while the figures were coming in and he was studying the count, he would retire to the Sunnybrook Motel two blocks away.

Mrs Whitlam supervised the arrangements for the party. A bar was set up in a corner of the back garden. In another corner was a makeshift toilet labelled “gents.” She explained proudly to early arrivals, “It’s a two-holer. Have a look at it.” At various places in the back garden were five television sets, their cords snaking among the shrubs to power points inside the house. On the roof, television technicians set up a microwave link disc, giving the house a science fiction appearance. There were three television outside broadcast vans in the street near the front gate.

On the patio, the television men had placed a ten foot high microphone to pick up the sounds of the party. It produced considerable amusement. “Have you seen it?” Peter Martin kept asking people. “It’s the Gough Whitlam microphone stand, the first one we’ve found that’s tall enough for him.” There was one television camera set up high, near the bar, which could sweep the whole garden. The other, on the patio, was to record whatever Whitlam might say in either victory or defeat. One of the bedrooms had been taken over as a press room, with half a dozen telephones on a long table.

Preparations in Bellevue Hill were more modest. At the insistence of Phil Davis the Liberal Party provided a tent for the press beside the swimming pool, with a few tables and chairs. Davis had stocked it with a car fridge and $30 worth of beer. There were no television sets until the TV men themselves set up monitors, but Davis left his transistor radio with the journalists mounting the vigil which, as the night wore on, they dubbed the “death watch.”

In the lounge room were two telephones and two portable television sets for McMahon and his close advisers. In the family room another set had been provided for the stenographers and Commonwealth car drivers on his staff.

McMahon appeared briefly to talk to the press and the cameras before the figures began coming in. He was confident of victory for the Coalition, he told them, and had no worries about his own position in Lowe. No one could be sure whether he believed it, but he appeared jaunty enough, immaculate in his freshly pressed blue suit, white shirt, crimson tie and carefully polished shoes. With a wave he disappeared into the house, not to be seen again for more than three hours except in silhouette through the lounge room windows.

It was a strange atmosphere inside the house, tense but not emotional. McMahon settled down at one telephone. John Howard, a vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party, remained glued to the other. Davis, Gaul, McMahon’s private secretary Ian Grigg, Mrs McMahon, and several friends of the family watched the results on the television sets. Little was said.

McMahon received frequent reports on his own seat from scrutineers, and remained outwardly calm even when it looked as though he might lose it. Only once did he snap at a party worker when conflicting figures were phoned in from Lowe. He was in constant contact with electoral officials in Canberra, and with the federal director of the Liberal Party, Bede Hartcher, who was in the national tally room. From time to time Howard handed him figures. Davis and Gaul kept him up to date with the figures coming up on television. He scribbled on a notepad, calculating the government’s position and appreciating it far better than anyone else in the room.

McMahon has the ability to “feel” a political situation before most other people. It is one of the reasons he was able to survive so many crises in his turbulent career, the talent that earned him a reputation as a political Houdini. He got the “gut” feeling that told him the government was heading for defeat almost as soon as the early figures began to come in. He was ready to concede by 10pm, but wanted to make sure Lowe was safe before he faced the questions of the press.

Hartcher and other Liberal officials urged him to wait, telling him there was still a chance the government could scrape back, but he knew better. Then [Liberal frontbencher] John Gorton appeared on television, admitting that Labor had won. The customs minister, Don Chipp, also conceded. And the treasurer, Billy Snedden. McMahon knew he had to go out on the lawn, where the cameras and the journalists were waiting like vultures. But first he had a cup of tea. Mrs McMahon handed it to him, and those in the room watched as he spooned in the sugar. His hand was steady.

The ordeal of the statement over, McMahon returned to the small group in the lounge room and sat quietly for a time. Then he perked up. “Oh well, that’s it,” he said. “We’ve got some champagne. Let’s open it.” From then on the mood was almost one of relief that it was all over. Party workers from Lowe dropped in, and some NSW Liberal Party officials. Outside, their work over for the night, journalists and TV men were drinking in the tent. Davis and Gaul joined them.

At about 1am a young woman broke through the security screen around the McMahon house by clambering over a fence from next door. She joined the press group, and gushed over McMahon and his wife when they emerged soon after for a final, off-the-record chat. Only once during the night did McMahon lapse into introspection and ask rhetorically, “Where did we go wrong?” He did not offer an answer to the question. Later he said, “At least we didn’t lose as many seats as in 1969.”

Whitlam’s staff spirited him away from his home to the motel soon after 8pm. Very few people knew where he had gone. It was well over an hour before a group of journalists and photographers tracked him down, and they were kept locked out of the room where he was studying the results.

Around the room were four television sets tuned to different channels. At one end was a table with a bank of seven phones. Richard Hall was constantly on the phone talking with scrutineers and candidates round the country, getting figures before they were posted in the tally room. Clem Lloyd, Lance Barnard’s press secretary, phoned through figures from the national tally room at regular intervals. David White was also manning phones.

Mungo MacCallum, the Nation Review journalist, had been co­opted to work a calculating machine. Whitlam sat in an armchair facing the television set tuned in to the ABC, but frequently he screwed himself around to watch the other sets as they showed new figures. Peter Martin was there. Graham Freudenberg sat on the bed listening intently to the analysis of British psephologist David Butler on Channel 7. Another of Whitlam’s press aides, Warwick Cooper, hovered in the background. His private secretary, Jim Spigelman, was making calculations on a notepad.

Bob Miller poured glasses of beer and orange juice for the workers. Also present was Ian Baker, press secretary of the Victorian opposition leader, Clyde Holding. There was whispered conversation. “It’s starting to look as though the DLP vote is down in Victoria,” said Martin at 8.45. “A trend is developing to us in the outer suburbs,” Hall told Whitlam a few minutes later. “We’ve got Phillip,” Freudenberg announced at 8.50. Placing his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, Hall read out the first figures for MacArthur and told Whitlam, “It looks like Bate is going to poll well.” Less than a minute later he interrupted another phone conversation to tell Whitlam, “There’s no doubt about it, the DLP is ratshit in Victoria. They’re going down.”

But Whitlam remained cautious. When the ABC showed figures for Mitchell and compere Robert Moore told viewers that Liberal member Les Irwin was trailing his Labor opponent, Whitlam commented, “It’s still not marvellous.” Hall announced. “There’s a clear absolute majority to us in Hume,” but Whitlam replied, “Later figures always go against us. We’d have to have a very good lead.” One of the TV screens showed Liberal Alan Jarman trailing in Deakin, but Whitlam said, “He’ll still get in, though.”

Whitlam showed little emotion as he stared intently at the television screen, until a little after 9pm when Hall told him, “I reckon we’ve won Casey, Holt, Latrobe, Diamond Valley and Denison.” On the TV set tuned to Channel 9, [journalist] Alan Reid was saying, “If this trend continues I’d say Labor is home and hosed.” Then Whitlam allowed himself a smile, and sprawled back in his chair clearly more relaxed.

At that point he knew he had almost certainly won. There was irony when one of the channels rescreened McMahon’s earlier interview, showing him saying, “I feel more confident than I did this morning.” But there was bad news, too. At 9.05 MacCallum looked up from his calculator and remarked, “In Bendigo David Kennedy is only on 48 per cent. He’ll go to preferences.” Whitlam became sombre again as he said, “But will he get them?” At 9.15 Whitlam gave Hall permission to phone the Labor candidate in Denison, John Coates, to congratulate him on a certain win.

Then Hall reported that Labor scrutineers had no doubt the party would win Evans. At 9.18 one of the staff let out a cry of “Jesus!” as figures for Flinders on one of the TV sets showed the labour and national service minister, Phillip Lynch, fighting to hold the seat. Then at 9.20 MacCallum performed some more calculations and announced to the assembled company, “I think we can send the white smoke up the chimney now.”

From then on, the mood in the room was one of elation. “Welcome home Victoria!” said Spigelman as one of the television computers came up with a printout showing a swing of 6 per cent to Labor there. NSW party officials had told Whitlam there was a good chance of a Labor win in the Country Party–held seat of Paterson, but he had not believed them. At 9.26, when Freudenberg said, “They were right about Paterson,” he sprang out of his chair with an astounded cry of “What?”

He rubbed his hands together gleefully when Freudenberg hold him a few minutes later, “Look. Race is in.” Race Mathews, his former private secretary, had a clear lead over the minister for the environment, Aborigines and the arts, Peter Howson, in the Victorian seat of Casey. At that point, Bob Miller was sent to fetch Mrs Whitlam, and as soon as she arrived Hall popped the cork from the first champagne bottle. Glasses were clinked all round. “Many happy returns,” said Mrs Whitlam.

Only the news from the South Australian seat of Sturt, where Labor’s Norm Foster had been defeated, interrupted the celebratory atmosphere. “We can’t really do without Norm,” said Mrs Whitlam. “We need someone with that sort of tenacity and ferocity.” Her husband was quickly on the phone to Foster, offering commiserations and promising to find a job for him.

But Whitlam was possibly more upset by the bad result for Labor in Bendigo, and he phoned David Kennedy too. The Labor leader has what his staff describe as “a thing” about by-elections. They have played an important part in his political career. It was his role in the Dawson by-election in Queensland which saved him from expulsion over his fight with the ALP machine on State Aid in 1966. In 1967 the by-election victory in Corio in Victoria was his first triumph as party leader, and gave him the leverage to secure reforms to the structure of the federal ALP conference and executive. In the same year the Capricornia by-election success helped him to “break” Harold Holt. In 1969 a by-election in Bendigo had shown his mastery over the then prime minister, Gorton. The possibility of losing one of the seats to which he had devoted such time and effort in a by-election campaign appeared to affect him deeply.

Whitlam had been hoping McMahon would go on television first to concede. But soon after 10.30 he decided further delay would be fruitless, and prepared to return to the house and the waiting cameras and pressmen. But first he and Mrs Whitlam posed for the photographers who were gathered outside the motel room. In typical fashion, they hammed it up. “This is my best side,” said Whitlam. “Well, my nose is too big on this side,” replied his wife, “but I’ll do it for you, dear.” Their eighteen-year-old daughter turned up and gave her father a hug. “Are you happy now, Dad?” she asked. “Yes, Cathy,” he said. “I hope you are.”

Back at the house a British journalist was phoning a story to his paper in London. “Australia has a new prime minister,” he dictated. “Yes, I’m quite serious.” In the back garden the party guests were milling around the television sets, sending up loud cheers as each new set of figures confirmed the Labor victory.

The NSW ALP president, John Ducker, wandering through the crowd beer in hand, did not seem to quite believe it. “There’s no doubt, is there?” he kept asking people. “Billy McMahon’s going to lose his seat,” a gloriously drunk party worker shouted at the top of his voice. Laughter rippled from one end of the garden to the other.

Then the word was passed excitedly through the crowd: “Gough’s coming. He’s here.” Whitlam’s tall figure could be seen slowly forcing its way through the crush as people tried to shake his hand or simply touch him.

Photographers held their cameras above their heads, trying to get shots. “Good on yer, Gough,” people shouted. And then the chanting started. “We want Gough! We want Gough!” Slowly he made his way to the sunroom door, stood there a moment smiling, and then disappeared inside.

Sometime later, when he had made his television appearance and done the right thing by his party guests, Whitlam returned to the motel and the stock of champagne for a quieter celebration. And there, away from the cameras and the crush, he was more expansive in his comments to journalists. The Liberals would have lost under any leader, he said, adding, “It’s just too silly for them to blame or for us to thank Bill McMahon. The whole show was running out of steam.” Then, a little wearily, “It’s been a long, hard road.” •

This is an extract from The Making of an Australian Prime Minister, published by Cheshire in 1973.

The post A party for the people appeared first on Inside Story.

“The funny little man,” Perkin told a colleague, “has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely in November and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them” — the Coalition — “to victory in 1975, and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!”

To modern readers, McMahon’s hopes seem as preposterous as they did to Perkin. Most accounts of his government use the same adjectives — incompetent, reactive, hapless, embarrassing — and follow the same line: nothing of consequence was achieved between 1969 and 1972, and the election of the Gough Whitlam–led Labor Party was never in question.

This view has several effects. One is to diminish Labor’s genuine achievement in 1972, when a party scarred by twenty years of discord and electoral failure convinced voters that the vision, policies and leadership Australia needed were to be found among its MPs. Another is to render the years from 1969 to 1972 as a shapeless interregnum between the going of prime minister Robert Menzies and the coming of Gough, an antipodean Dark Ages during which nothing really happened. The last is to leave our understanding of those years profoundly incomplete by failing to take seriously the efforts of the Coalition government to govern during a period of immense change.

While confident of victory, Whitlam always insisted the 1972 campaign was a live contest. And while he was never backward in adducing McMahon’s flaws, he also perceived an opponent more wily than popularly imagined. As prime minister, Whitlam argued, McMahon had tried to “bestride two horses”: “He claimed to be the real heir to Menzies, yet he also claimed to recognise and accept the need for change in a changing world.” And the result? “This balancing act he did with some skill.”

A “balancing act” is one useful way of understanding the Coalition government’s actions during 1969–72, of seeing how it tried relentlessly, first under John Gorton and then under McMahon, to manoeuvre itself into a position where another election victory might be possible.

At a distance, the events following the 1969 election are confounding: the leader of the victorious party was immediately challenged by two of his own ministers.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1969 election result — which resulted in the Coalition’s loss of sixteen seats — confirmed the waning fortunes of a government in office for two decades. At the time, though, it seemed more like a stern rebuke to prime minister John Gorton. Vaulting him from the Senate into the prime ministership after the unexpected death of Harold Holt, Gorton’s colleagues had elevated him in the belief that he possessed sound and sorely needed political judgement, and that his ability to perform on television would be compelling to voters.

The two years that followed brought both beliefs into question. Gorton’s ambivalence towards some of his colleagues and his tendency to unilateral decision-making antagonised many within the government and increasingly alarmed those outside it. Strong-willed and confident, he rarely backed down: “John Grey Gorton,” he rounded on one impertinent senator, “will bloody well behave precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave!”

After a strong start, moreover, Gorton’s abilities as a public speaker seemed to desert him over the course of 1968–69. Tortuously convoluted prime ministerial statements became so much the norm that Whitlam took to ridiculing Gorton simply by quoting him verbatim. As one famous example ran, “On the other hand, the AMA agrees with us, or, I believe, will agree with us, that it is its policy, and it will be its policy, to inform patients who ask what the common fee is, and what our own fee is, so that a patient will know whether he is to be operated on, if that’s what it is, on the basis of the common fee or not.”

Amid these personal shortcomings were more serious policy disagreements. During the 1969 campaign, Gorton had gestured towards traditional Coalition strengths as well as “new horizons”: alongside hawkish statements on national security and tax cuts, he promised increased spending on education, a new Australian film school, and reforms to healthcare. But his statements about defence did little to assuage suspicious hardliners in his own party and in the avowedly anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, which generally backed the government. And his moves to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam failed to mollify the anti-war protesters who took to the streets in successive moratorium marches.

Gorton’s domestic policies, meanwhile, many of which included an empowered Commonwealth reaching into matters traditionally the purview of the states, antagonised state premiers and colleagues whose fidelity to federalism was a matter of faith.

All this fed into the leadership challenge launched less than two weeks after the election. While treasurer McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn failed in their bid to displace Gorton, the fissures their challenge exposed didn’t close over. A ministerial reshuffle to blood a younger generation of MPs — including Malcolm Fraser, Billy Snedden and Andrew Peacock — spurred suggestions of cronyism. Backbenchers attacked government legislation in the privacy of the government party room and the public spaces of the House and Senate.

A poor showing at the half-Senate election, late in 1970, was followed by an unsuccessful party-room motion for Gorton’s resignation; then a murky series of press reports in March 1971 spurred Fraser to resign as defence minister and savage Gorton in the House. A confidence vote on Gorton’s leadership tied; Gorton resigned as prime minister; McMahon was elevated to the top job; and — farcically — Gorton was elected, if only for a short time, to the deputy party leadership. As one reporter exclaimed after the last of these events, “You must be joking.”

The bitterness engendered by these developments lingered. Trust was non-existent, whispers of further leadership spills continued, and policy disagreements were so pronounced that the break-up of the Coalition was even broached. In McMahon, the government had a leader who had done much to sow the seeds of this turmoil and who, in office, would sow more still; but, again in McMahon, it had a politician with twenty years of experience at the highest levels of government who was willing to do all he could to stay in office. As governor-general Paul Hasluck wryly remarked, McMahon would “not be cumbered either by ideals or principles” in pursuing that goal.

McMahon’s at-all-costs attitude surfaced conspicuously when he began shifting and tacking on the question of whether Australia should extend diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China, abandoning its long recognition of the Taiwan-based Republic of China and the fiction that the latter remained the sole, legitimate government of China.

In 1958, as a relatively lowly minister, McMahon had argued that the People’s Republic should not be admitted into the international community until it had renounced the use of violence; as minister for external affairs, in 1970, he agreed that the country could not forever remain on the periphery but insisted on putting conditions on any kind of recognition or engagement. His view was influenced more by domestic political circumstances than any moral or strategic factor: “Remember, please, that we have a DLP,” McMahon told deputy secretary Mick Shann, “and that its reaction must be considered!”

By the time the Gorton cabinet reviewed its relationship with the People’s Republic, in February 1971, its resolution was similarly timid: it accepted that the government in Peking (as Beijing was known) was engaging with the international community and that Australia’s policy of diplomatic recognition would have to be reappraised — but decided that it would, for the moment, follow the lead of the United States.

The consequences of this hesitant ambivalence began to play out a month after McMahon became prime minister, when Whitlam sought an invitation to visit Peking. McMahon attacked him on grounds of naivety for engaging with a government that had not yet renounced violence; then, when Whitlam’s invitation to visit was granted, announced that his government would “explore the possibilities of establishing a dialogue” with Peking.

In the space of a month, McMahon had put his government astride two horses, of opposition and of engagement. He still believed the government to be riding high when Whitlam visited China in July. Criticising the Labor leader for his “instant coffee diplomacy,” he told a gathering of Liberal Party members that China “has been a political asset to the Liberal Party in the past and is likely to remain one in the future.”

That future was terribly short-lived. Within days of Whitlam’s visit, US president Richard Nixon announced he would visit China the following year. McMahon sputtered. He told the press that “normalising relations with China,” as Nixon was doing, had been his government’s policy all along, but in private he was angry and embarrassed, aghast that he had been so publicly undercut. Lashing out, he sacked his foreign minister and criticised Nixon. In the eyes of the Americans he was “on edge and almost frenzied in trying to stay on top of his job”; to the British, McMahon knew already that he was “not much good in the part” of prime minister.

McMahon eventually conceded that his government had failed on China. He was aware that Whitlam had won considerable plaudits and that he himself had looked a fool. Yet he continued to try to ride the two horses. He explored accompanying Nixon to Peking; he tried to find a halfway point between complete aversion and the diplomatic recognition Whitlam had promised. Rebuffed by the Chinese, he was then rebuked by DLP leader Vince Gair, who denounced the contest over who was more “ahead” on the issue of China. Stung, McMahon refused an invitation for army minister Andrew Peacock to visit China as part of an unofficial business party.

When the People’s Republic was admitted to the UN General Assembly and took a seat on the Security Council late in 1971, McMahon’s attempt to reconcile opposing pressures finally came to an end. Resiling from engagement with China was no longer an option, and yet China would not accept anything less than diplomatic recognition. The horses had bolted.

Another attempted balancing act came in the middle of 1971 when the South African government sent an all-white Springboks rugby team to Australia. Foreshadowing an October tour by South Africa’s cricket side, the Springboks became a barometer of how fast public opinion could turn on an issue. A Gallup poll taken in March 1971 had found that almost 85 per cent of Australians thought the South Africans should come, and most members of McMahon’s government believed, as Menzies did, that the cancellation of a South African tour of England in 1970 had been a surrender to the “threats of a noisy minority” and were not willing to do likewise.

McMahon genuflected to respectable opinion by making much of his disappointment that South Africa had sent a whites-only team, but he baulked at any real response. “We believe that the [all-white] policy in respect of teams is unfortunate, but it is nevertheless a South African matter, and not our matter,” he said privately during what happened to be the UN International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Race Discrimination.

Having effectively condoned a racially selected team, McMahon’s government then directed that Australia abstain from voting on a UN resolution condemning the application of apartheid in sport. It then helped sustain the tour by making available an RAAF aircraft to ferry the Springboks around the country after the ACTU and its president Bob Hawke promised to impose a “black ban” on the tour. “We are not going to be beaten here,” McMahon said privately.

Disruptive protests met with furious responses from Liberal–Country state governments. Victorian premier Henry Bolte called the demonstrators “louts and larrikins”; Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency so as to more easily crack heads. Amid the barbed-wire barricades, smoke bombs and police batons, McMahon mused about calling an election with a law-and-order theme.

By the time the South Africans left, the weight of public opinion had shifted completely. McMahon’s own ministers were against an early election and dreaded the prospect of a repetition of the controversy when the South African cricketers arrived in summer. Not willing to admit defeat, the government refused to decide whether that tour should take place. It threw the ball to Sir Donald Bradman, chair of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket, leaving it to him to make the necessary decision to call off the tour.

Yet another example of McMahon’s balancing act emerged at the end of 1971, when he made clear to a cabinet committee that he supported applications from Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory for leases on consolidated lands, provided they could satisfy criteria related to their association with the land. Had this been translated into government policy, it would have been an acknowledgement that a traditional association with the land should be a basis for land rights claims. His view diverged from those of the cabinet committee members considering the government’s approach to Indigenous issues. The fact that McMahon’s subsequent wavering failed to bring them around was reflected in their decision in late December 1971.

When McMahon issued a statement on Aboriginal policy on 26 January, it featured a gaping hole. The new objectives, though laudable, were overshadowed by the government’s failure on land rights. McMahon announced the creation of a new form of lease but ruled out land claims made on the basis of traditional association. The reason? To do so would introduce a “new, probably confusing component, the implications of which could not clearly be foreseen, and which could lead to uncertainty and possible challenge in relation to land titles elsewhere in Australia which are at present unquestioned and secure.”

The attempt to hew to a conservative course — rejecting a traditional association with the land — and simultaneously announce updated objectives for government policy fell flat. The timing hardly helped: McMahon’s statement came on a day traditionally considered a day of mourning by Indigenous peoples. The statement spurred one of the striking images of that year: four Indigenous men sitting beneath an umbrella as the sun rose on the lawns outside Parliament House the following day, a sign strung up beside them reading “Aboriginal Embassy.”

Failures like these left the government far from the “first, fine, careless rapture” that Menzies had suggested was necessary to stay in office. “There is an imminent feeling of decay about the place,” recorded Liberal MP Bert Kelly when parliament resumed late in February 1972.

Blame for the government’s woes fell almost entirely on McMahon. As Kelly asked his diary, “What the devil do we do next? We’ve got Billy McMahon elected as our leader and obviously he is not doing it at all well and everybody knows this. What we can’t think of is, how do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.”

The unrest stirred by dire polling, as well as whispers that John Gorton might try to supplant him, didn’t bring out the best in McMahon. “Christ, he must be mad,” said one MP, after one blundering parliamentary debate by the prime minister. “What is wrong with him?” asked another.

Everything the government and its prime minister did seemed to end in disaster. McMahon’s late-1971 trips to the United States and Britain had been memorable for a mangled toast to his hosts, his wife’s revealing dress and Richard Nixon’s inability to remember his name. A swing through Southeast Asia early in 1972 became an “excursion to blunderland,” declared a Canberra News journalist, extinguishing any hopes of making defence and foreign affairs a centrepiece of a re-election campaign.

But ministers also shared in the blame, with no small number of blunders and public spats occupying headlines. Some ministers dithered; others were disengaged. David Fairbairn regarded the five months he spent as education minister, in 1971, as hard and unrewarding, and departed the portfolio admitting he had not achieved anything.

Environment minister Peter Howson, meanwhile, citing the lack of an explicit directive, did himself no favours when he refused to lend Australia’s support to New Zealand’s criticism of renewed French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1972, putting the government at odds with public opinion. (A belated move that mainly suggested the government was going along with the public for craven reasons.)

The economic outlook also proved difficult for the government. The Coalition had been nearly broken by a currency revaluation forced upon it when the Smithsonian Agreement — which pegged currencies to the US dollar — came into operation in December 1971. Slowing economic growth and rising inflation spooked treasurer Billy Snedden and McMahon, who were soon at loggerheads over how to get the economy moving in time for the election. The government was caught between the competing objectives of economic rigour and voter-attractive spending.

After a tough budget in 1971, the increased pensions and reduced personal income taxes in the government’s April 1972 mini-budget suggested a new focus on the pending election. As deputy prime minister Doug Anthony admitted, “I wouldn’t be very honest if I said that this [the election] isn’t in the back of our minds.” The budget proper, issued in August, was even more electorally focused: “Taxes down; pensions up; and growth decidedly strengthened,” as Billy Snedden remarked.

The attempt to find a way between change and stasis often saw progress. Under customs minister Don Chipp, the government liberalised censorship policy yet also refused to authorise the publication of Philip Roth’s controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia — only for a monied publisher to embarrass the government by evading its jurisdiction and publishing the book anyway. The government was ignominiously forced to remove its ban on Portnoy in 1971, and the following year an attempt to hold the line on the banned Little Red Schoolbook foundered when activists smuggled it into the country and began distributing free copies. Chipp insisted that the government remove its ineffective ban, but Malcolm Fraser and other ministers continued to protest that the book “undermined family and society.”

Other initiatives came too, on an unexpectedly broad front. Writing a decade later, Donald Horne wondered whether McMahon was too busy “plucking policy out of passing straws” to know what he was doing. But in terms of results, Horne conceded, the government modernised the political agenda in a significant number of ways.

Although the government resiled from passing a wholly new Trade Practices Act, it did initiate new laws preventing foreign takeovers. It withdrew the last Australian combat troops from Vietnam, leaving only 128 members of the Australian Army Training Team in the country. It joined the Five Powers Defence Arrangements and the OECD. It passed the Childcare Act, which allowed the Commonwealth to intervene in the childcare sector and helped transform it into a profession supported by research and grants. It increased education spending and the number of scholarship places at universities and TAFEs.

The government also adopted the “polluter pays” principle for environmental protection, and began giving the Commonwealth the capacity to intervene in environmental matters. Howson, for all his grumbles that he had been given responsibility for “trees, boongs and poofters” as minister for the environment, Aborigines, and the arts, was nonetheless the first person to be appointed with explicit responsibility for these policy areas.

Notably, too, the government released its own urban and regional development policy. This was partly in response to Whitlam’s well-established interest in this area, but also a recognition of public demand for Commonwealth action. Meeting that demand required the government to overcome its longstanding aversion to Commonwealth intervention in state responsibilities.

Housing minister Kevin Cairns’s priority was “to seek agreement at all levels that an urban policy is needed” — rather than to actually devise a policy — but McMahon pushed for both the agreement and a policy. He reserved to his authority and his department responsibilities traditionally held by state governments, and then, in September, pushed cabinet to create the National Urban and Regional Development Authority to foster a “better balance of population distribution and regional development in Australia.”

When he introduced the legislation, McMahon stressed the significance of the change that was now manifest: “It marks our recognition that there is a direct contribution that the Commonwealth government can make in national urban and regional development.” It also showed that the government had an answer to Labor’s policies in this area.

“We should be able to tell people where we stand and where we are heading,” McMahon had written in August 1971. Here, perhaps, was the government’s approach in a single phrase: stasis and movement. When McMahon went to Government House to seek a dissolution of parliament, he felt sufficiently confident that his two-pronged approach would be enough to see the government returned. To Paul Hasluck, he predicted the Coalition would pick up two seats in Western Australia and two seats in New South Wales — and perhaps even three in Victoria. He didn’t envision losing any seats except, perhaps, that of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay.

That prediction was somewhat redeemed: the Coalition picked up two seats in Western Australia and one seat apiece in Victoria and South Australia. But it lost six seats in New South Wales, four in Victoria, and one apiece in Tasmania and Queensland, with the result that Labor took office with a nine-seat majority.

It was a closer result than many would like to think. The rural gerrymander meant that around 2000 votes distributed across five seats could have allowed the government to cling to office. In such an event, the first steps in McMahon’s forecast to Perkin may well have been vindicated.

Why the close result? Some have pointed to the electorate’s innate conservatism, especially after twenty-three years of Coalition rule. Few have suggested that McMahon might have been a factor in limiting the swing — but one of them was his successor as prime minister. Without McMahon’s skill, tenacity, and resourcefulness, Whitlam later wrote, Labor’s victory in 1972 would have been “more convincing than it was.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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The Liberal Party took another trouncing, losing most of the seat-by-seat contests for the fifteenth time in Victoria’s last sixteen federal and state elections. Despite leader Matthew Guy’s optimistic claims in his concession speech last night, it is very unlikely to end up with more seats; at best it could hold on to the same small number it started with. It seems even further from winning back power.

The Nationals had a night to relish, taking back all three seats they had lost to regional independents over the previous eight years and holding their own with the greatest of ease. But the Liberals’ malaise condemns them, too, to remain on the opposition benches seemingly forever, until a new crowd can win control of the Liberals, recruit members from mainstream Australia and take the party back to the middle ground.

Early last night the Greens’ tide came in. Their vote was surging and it seemed they might sweep through inner Melbourne to win as many as nine of the Assembly’s eighty-eight seats. But as the night wore on, the tide went out again, their vote slumped back to its 2018 level, and it looks like they won just one more seat, Richmond.

And the independents had a terrible night. The two remaining regional independents, seen as tied to Labor, paid the price for the government’s lack of interest in country Victoria. Of the four teal indies backed by Climate 200, two will be elected at best, but more likely none. In other seats, the average independent won only a few per cent of the vote; in the end, they were poorly funded amateurs up against well-funded professionals.

There might be one exception: Gaetano Greco, an independent from Preston in the northern suburbs, who seems to have slipped through unnoticed while Labor was focused on the Greens. More on him later.

The one blow for Daniel Andrews was in the Legislative Council: on current counting, Labor would lose three seats, forcing it to rely on support from the Greens or the fringe parties of the right — One Nation, the Shooters and the DLP — to pass any legislation the Liberals and Nationals oppose. That was predictable, and predicted, but it could require a more inclusive style of governing.

As I half-forecast, this election looks like introducing a significant newcomer to Victorian politics: Legalise Cannabis Victoria. It’s the party formerly known as HEMP, but its rebranding and its decision to be part of a preference swap among left-wing parties could win it two seats in the Council, maybe more. It’s very significant that it’s got there with Labor preferences. Soon the joint could be jumping.

The Council aside, this election confirmed more than it changed. Andrews’s one-man rule and uncompromising way of handling the pandemic have been endorsed by the majority of Victorians, at the cost of alienating both those seriously inconvenienced or maddened by the repeated lockdowns, and increasingly, the minority of Victorians who dislike his government’s lack of transparency, lack of openness, centralisation of power and slide into heavy debt.

The transparency warriors were never going to win yesterday: they had no horse in the race. Their best hope now is that the smaller parties of the left — the Greens, but also Fiona Patten (if she gets back), the dope smokers and Animal Justice — might use their numbers in the Council to pressure Labor to raise the quality of Victorian democracy, as the governments of John Cain, Steve Bracks and John Brumby did.

This election was a triumph for the defenders. Labor has lost only four or five seats from the fifty-six that were nominally its seats after the redistribution. The Liberals were defending virtually nothing but marginal seats; yet they’ve lost only two for sure, and possibly two more. The Greens and Nationals had bumper swings in all their seats. Only the independents lost out.

The Liberals and Nationals never had a hope of winning the extra eighteen seats they needed to form government. Whatever their leaders said publicly, the best they could hope for was to win enough votes and seats to be in a position to make a realistic bid for power in 2026. And they failed.

Guy put the best spin on it he could last night, claiming his team had won a 4 per cent swing and got “more than halfway” to closing the gap. Not so. As Ben Raue of the Tally Room points out, the average swing was more like 2.5 per cent. The Coalition will have only half as many seats as Labor in the new Assembly, much the same as in Labor’s last term. The party’s new leader will start from no better a position than four years ago.

What went wrong? First, Labor had few marginal seats to defend: most of its seats had majorities of more than 10 per cent. Only ten Labor seats were held by margins of less than 5 per cent — and when you have a government willing to play Scott Morrison’s game of spending taxpayers’ money to win marginal seats, there is no advantage like incumbency.

On ABC TV last night, Antony Green pointed out the sharp difference between the zero swing (or at one stage, a swing to Labor) in seats southeast of the Yarra, where most of the marginal seats are, and the big swings against Labor in some seats in the more deprived Labor heartland, north and west of the river; but the Liberals were starting from too far back to win any of them.

Late counting in some seats moderated that difference. Late at night the Liberals reclaimed Kew and Caulfield, both of which seemed lost two hours earlier, took the lead in Hawthorn and Mornington, secured Polwarth, Croydon and Rowville, and got back in the contest in Hastings. Meanwhile across the river, Labor pulled away from the Greens in Northcote, Footscray and Pascoe Vale.

Some of the swings against Labor in the outer-northern and western suburbs were extraordinary. There was a swing of 14 per cent against energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio in Mill Park, 12.5 per cent in Yan Yean, 15 per cent in Greenvale, and 8 to 10 per cent in Broadmeadows, Sunbury and Sydenham. But the Liberals’ past vote in these areas was so low that it didn’t even come within 5 per cent of winning any of these seats.

The Liberals were not a problem for Labor in its rusted-on heartland. With one exception, nor were the independents. There were dozens of them in Labor’s safe seats, many making the case that their area had been neglected because it was a safe seat. But Labor’s campaign team identified what it saw as the three real threats — Melton, Point Cook and Werribee — and ensured that they were not forgotten in the campaign promises. After their strong showing in Melton and Werribee in 2018, the independents flopped badly there in 2022.

Here’s my scoop. The exception — completely overlooked in last night’s coverage — was Preston, and Gaetano Greco. A long-time Darebin councillor and Labor activist, Greco had the advantage of running in an area where the Liberals are weak and the Greens and (increasingly) Victorian Socialists have eroded Labor’s support. A plan to demolish most of the heritage Preston Market became the centrepiece of his campaign, along with a range of local issues that the state government was not tackling because Preston posed no political problem. So Greco resolved to make it one.

Apart from Labor and Greco, seven other candidates ran in Preston — and six of them (all but the Freedom Party) directed preferences to Greco. Labor’s Nathan Lambert (denounced by Greco as a candidate “parachuted in from Geelong”) has 38.3 per cent of the vote, and the rest are evenly divided: Liberals 16.5 per cent, Greens 14.8, Greco 14.2, Victorian Socialists 6.7, others preferencing Greco 6.6 and others preferencing Labor 2.9.

While some preferences always leak, it seems certain that Greco will overtake the Greens and the Liberals to make the final two with Labor. Who wins the seat will then depend on how many preferences leak to Lambert: on these figures, he needs about 25 per cent for Labor to hold the seat, which gives Greco a 50–50 chance, though the postal votes will favour Labor. Victoria’s electoral commission will have to carry out a new two-candidate count for the two of them.

Early in the night, the Greens looked like being the big story. The commission’s two-candidate counts showed them clearly ahead in Northcote and Richmond, and neck and neck with Labor in Albert Park, Footscray, Pascoe Vale and Preston. But as the prepoll votes were counted the Liberals pushed the Greens into third place in Albert Park, and Labor regained the lead in Northcote, and pulled ahead in the rest. Richmond will be the Greens’ only gain in the Legislative Assembly.

The final Greens first-preference vote statewide will end up much the same as the 10.7 per cent they polled in 2018. But that is largely because there was far more competition, with roughly three times as many micro-party candidates as in 2018. The Greens have increasingly cast themselves as an inner-suburban party, and in Melbourne they are expanding that territory. In 2026 they will be the sitting party or serious competitors in nine seats.

Apart from Greco, three teal independents were the only indies to come close to winning a seat. At the close of counting, Kate Lardner had 49.8 per cent of the two-candidate vote in Mornington, Melissa Lowe had 49.4 per cent in Hawthorn, and Sophie Torney 47 per cent in Kew. With postal votes favouring the Liberals, all of them are likely to lose, but it will be close.

Liberals trying to find something to celebrate last night were grateful for the likely return of leading moderate John Pesutto in Hawthorn and the arrival of Jess Wilson in Kew. Pesutto could be a candidate for the party leadership if and when Guy steps down.

The Liberals didn’t have much to celebrate elsewhere. To put themselves in a position to win in 2026, they needed to win back the eastern suburbs seats they lost last time, but Labor successfully defended Ashwood (formerly Burwood), Box Hill and Ringwood, and captured Glen Waverley and Bayswater (nominally Liberal after the redistribution). The outer-suburban seats of Pakenham and Yan Yean, both seen as Liberal chances, stayed with Labor.

Labor maintained its grip on Geelong’s four seats, as well as the two seats each in Ballarat and Bendigo. The Coalition’s one success in Victoria’s bigger regional centres came when the Nationals reclaimed Morwell, the centre of Victoria’s electricity industry, which is facing a dismal decade ahead with the gradual closure of all three coal-fired power stations. Andrews’s promise to revive the former State Electricity Commission as a renewable energy provider, while popular in Melbourne, brought no comfort to the Latrobe Valley.

In the Legislative Council, however, Labor looks set to lose a lot of ground. With 20 to 30 per cent of the vote counted, Labor was on track to lose three seats. That leaves it with only fifteen of the Council’s forty seats, which would make it uncomfortably dependent on support from the Greens or a collection of right-wing parties to get contested legislation through.

The biggest swings against Labor were again in the northern and western suburbs: 10 per cent in the Northern Metropolitan seat, 11 per cent in the west. But Labor lost ground everywhere, costing it seats in South-Eastern Metro, Northern Victoria and Western Metro.

It’s important to remember that these are early figures, and Victoria’s group voting system means small changes to the figures can cause quite different outcomes. As the numbers stand, though, three of those seats would go to left-wing parties who formed an alliance with Labor and the Greens to get their preferences first.

Legalise Cannabis Victoria is on track to win seats in Melbourne’s southeastern and western suburban regions, and is close in several others. Animal Justice, thanks to a deal negotiated when it was falsely pretending to be part of preference whisperer Glenn Druery’s alliance, stands to win a seat in Northern Victoria but has lost its leader, Andy Meddick, from Western Victoria.

Reason Party leader Fiona Patten is on track to narrowly hold her seat in Melbourne’s northern suburbs in a three-way contest with the Victorian Socialists and former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek, now running for the DLP.

The Greens vote lifted everywhere: on these figures, enough to give them upper house seats in Western Victoria, North-Eastern (formerly Eastern) Metropolitan and Southern Metropolitan, while its leader Samantha Ratnam comfortably held her seat in the northern suburbs. If that holds, those four seats will be their most important victory at this election.

The Druery group had a bad night. In 2018, Druery’s team won nine of the forty seats. Last night, they won two (or three, if you count the seat won by Animal Justice on preferences Druery arranged before the party betrayed him). The DLP won a seat in North-Eastern Metropolitan from fellow Druery group party Transport Matters, and could still end up with seats in Northern Metro, where Somyurek is standing, and Western Metro, where their candidate is controversial former Liberal MLC Bernie Finn.

On current figures, however, the Liberals would reclaim their second seat in the western suburbs by just pipping Finn at the post, while the Coalition would also gain seats in Northern Victoria and Western Victoria. One Nation would take a seat in Northern Victoria from the Druery group, whose only other success was in Eastern Victoria, where Shooters party leader Jeff Bourman is on track to retain his seat.

I suspect these figures will change before the counting is over, but for now, the numbers in the forty-member Council would be: Labor fifteen, Liberals and Nationals fourteen, Greens four and Legalise Cannabis two, with one seat each for Reason, Animal Justice, One Nation, the DLP and the Shooters.

Whatever the final numbers, Labor will be in a minority but will have to find a way to make it work. Might we even see the two main parties of the left in Victoria lift their game to forge a constructive working relationship as their counterparts have in the ACT? Pigs might fly.

Like him or loathe him, this election result was a personal triumph for Daniel Andrews. It was in many ways about him, and his way of governing. No Victorian premier in my lifetime has acquired such an avid, uncritical fan base, or so many opponents who detest him (although Jeff Kennett came close). His photo appeared not only on Labor’s how-to-vote cards but also on those of other parties wanting to inspire Victorians to vote against him. The result, Labor’s overwhelming victory, speaks for itself.

The pandemic was rarely mentioned in the election campaign, but you suspect that, somewhere in voters’ minds, it was a defining issue. If you approved of Andrews’s handling of the pandemic, you voted for him. If you didn’t, you voted against him. There were many parties against him, but the election results showed us they’re still small parties.

The risk is that his success will further boost what Labor MPs described to his biographer Sumeyya Ilanbey as his sense that he’s always the smartest guy in the room. In his first term in office, Andrews consulted and listened more. In his second term, we’re told, he regarded listening to critics or people with different views as a waste of time. Many are urging him to adopt a more inclusive style in his third term. That could be challenging.

He starts his third term facing many problems. The Covid pandemic is as deadly as ever: last week sixty-two Victorians were reported dead from the disease, half the national death toll. The state budget is out of control, and Josh Gordon and Chip Le Grand of the Age have shown how the numbers are being fudged to make it appear that all is well.

Those are problems for tomorrow. Today, Daniel Andrews and Labor are winners with cause to celebrate. •

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In fact, the most recent set of numbers, from the Age Resolve poll, shows a two-party-preferred lead of twenty points for Labor: Danslide 2 territory. Simply regaining what was lost in 2018, let alone winning a majority, will be a major achievement for the Liberals. And the task is rendered all the more challenging by independent candidates seeking to replicate the “teal bath” of May’s federal election in Liberal seats like Kew, Hawthorn and Mornington. All this in the state once seen as the jewel in the Liberal crown.

And yet, every day, there he is, on the telly, in the papers, on the campaign trail: Liberal leader Matthew Guy trying to scale his election mountain. His climbing pick for this year’s attempt to reach the electoral summit? Health policy. Since returning to the state leadership a year ago, Guy has spent months attacking the government’s alleged mismanagement of the state’s health system — the shortages of hospital beds, trip-zero delays, ambulance ramping, gigantic elective surgery waitlists and more.

To repair the damage, he has promised major investments in new and refurbished hospitals, in massive recruitment and training schemes, and to slash waiting times. The result has been a runaway bidding war on health: so far, the Liberals have promised $4.5 billion for hospital infrastructure alone, and Labor is north of $6 billion, matching the Liberals on some points, exceeding them on others.

To an extent, the strategy suggests the Liberals have learnt from their mistakes. In 2018, Guy led the party to an ignominious defeat after campaigning heavily on crime — and particularly the threat supposedly posed by “African gangs.” The party’s own campaign post-mortem noted that “the focus on African gangs became a distraction for some key voters who saw it as a political tactic rather than an authentic problem to be solved by initiatives that would help make their neighbourhoods safer.”

This time, rather than trying to conjure an issue from the subterranean depths, the Liberals are focusing on the item already at the top of the agenda for many voters. Indeed, the electorate may never have been as acutely aware of limits of the health system as it is after the pandemic. Shortages of staff and beds have led to blowouts in waiting times, with vulnerable patients sleeping in tents and on benches. The Australian Medical Association says that less than two-thirds of emergency department patients were seen within four hours in 2020–21, while the ABC reported that as many as 800 emergency patients went home each day without having been seen.

Delays in answering triple-zero calls, meanwhile, have been associated with a dozen deaths over the past twelve months, and a review of the authority running the service found it not fit-for-purpose. No wonder Guy told his party, “It’s the healthcare system, stupid!” It is indeed an unavoidable and irresistible target for the opposition.

What’s more, campaigning on health has delivered dividends for other oppositions around the country this year. SA opposition leader Peter Malinauskas brought Labor into government in March following a campaign keenly focused on problems in healthcare, and particularly the state’s ambulance ramping crisis. And Anthony Albanese made it into the Lodge at least partly thanks to promises to make it easier to go to the doctor and to get prescription medication. Health is on voters’ minds; health is what is swaying them away from incumbents.

The problem for Matthew Guy is this: campaigning on health as a Labor leader is one thing; doing the same as a Liberal is another. Polls stretching back a long way show voters in Australia tend to trust Labor to handle the healthcare system far more than they do the Liberals. Labor “owns” health just as the Coalition “owns” crime and economic management.

This concept of issue ownership sprang up first in the work of the American political scientist John Petrocik. According to his account, the association of a party with issue competence isn’t necessarily based on actual performance. Voters don’t carefully follow what a party is doing or what a candidate has delivered (or failed to deliver). Rather, the reputation builds up over time and become ingrained at an almost subconscious level — which is what makes it incredibly hard to challenge. Labor owns health almost no matter how bad the health system gets on its watch.

Or, take another example, the Coalition and migration. According to this “sticky” theory of issue ownership, even if Labor adopts the same policies as its opponent, voters will still see the Coalition as more credible and effective at managing migration. These perceptions are entrenched; they are not continuously re-evaluated as new information comes in. A change in issue ownership doesn’t come easily, according to Petrocik. Only an especially acute crisis shakes voters out of their assumptions about who owns what.

Such a notion has profound implications for campaign strategies. It pushes parties to campaign about their issues and to ignore their opponents’ issues. To take the alternative course — to try to show voters why you would do better in your opponent’s areas of strength — is to fall into a kind of strategic trap.

A classic case, the 1994 governor’s race for California, has been described by American scholar Adam Simon. Simon shows how the Democratic frontrunner in that campaign, Kathleen Brown, blew a twenty-point lead against incumbent Republican Pete Wilson. Wilson was unpopular because of the dire economic situation he had presided over in California. But although Brown was the preferred candidate for economic management among voters, he succeeded in moving the focus of the campaign towards illegal immigration, in part by pairing it with his controversial Proposition 187 vote to cut off most social services to undocumented migrants.

Brown’s mistake was to follow Wilson into that territory. She stopped campaigning on the economy and education, started critiquing Wilson’s Proposition and launched her own immigration policies, courting endorsements from immigration-focused groups and explaining to voters that she was tougher than she looked on the question. It was a disaster: Wilson, having polled just 29 per cent support a year earlier, won the election by a devastating fourteen points. Had Brown simply ignored Wilson’s campaign and stuck with the economy, so the theory goes, Wilson would have been toast.

Matthew Guy could well be leading the Liberals into a similar trap. Despite the real problems in the health system, it seems entirely plausible that Labor is still more trusted by most voters on health than are the Liberals. If that’s the case, every time Guy elevates the issue he is sending undecided voters back Labor rather than to the Liberals. Every attack, every promise for more health funding, is another reminder to vote Labor — or so the theory goes.

This is not a sure thing of course — Guy could be making a dent in Labor’s ownership of health. Maybe Victoria’s crisis is acute enough for voters to shake off their assumptions and shift — we shall have to see. But the theory suggests this is close to impossible to do.

Whatever your partisan preferences, there’s something grim about Guy’s campaign on health backfiring in this way. It would seem to encourage more “African gangs”–style campaigning — the strategy of changing the topic, avoiding opponents’ issues, avoiding real dialogue. The Liberals are showing a certain admirable bravery by engaging in real debate about the issue at the top of voters’ agenda rather than trying to direct attention elsewhere. We would be better served, as an electorate, if we had more debates like this. •

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That was the year after John Hewson lost the unlosable election to Paul Keating. Labor had been in power for a decade, Australia had endured a severe recession in 1991 and the popular Bob Hawke had been replaced by the unpopular Keating. And yet the Liberals lost. Twenty-eight years later, the arguments in Is the Party Over? have striking resonances.

Puplick is what was once called a Liberal “wet,” as opposed to the party’s conservative “dries.” (They’re better known these days as small “l” liberals, or moderates.) Among the reasons he cited for Hewson’s loss to Keating was the pledge to opt out of environmental policy by deferring to states’ rights — or, as Puplick put it, “the right of states to butcher the environment.” The Coalition’s advocacy of nuclear power was “plainly stupid.” It had failed to recognise the rights of Aboriginal Australians. Its narrow-minded, penny-pinching approach to the arts and “bizarre threats to all but destroy the great national institution of the ABC” had cost it votes in the arts community. Its “crass homophobia” had alienated the gay and lesbian community.

He argued that the party also had a problem with women dating back to 1987, when the John Howard–led Coalition opposed the Hawke government’s affirmative action legislation for government employees. “Indeed,” wrote Puplick, “John Howard’s problem in the eyes of many feminists was compounded by the fact that the two most ardently pro-feminist members of his shadow cabinet, Peter Baume and Ian Macphee, were both ruthlessly eliminated from it.” Baume had been shadow minister for women’s affairs. Puplick himself lost his seat in the 1990 election after being relegated to third place on the NSW Senate ticket.

Yet the Liberal Party had a proud track record on these issues, Puplick argued, pointing to measures including creating the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Kakadu and Uluru national parks, steering through the 1967 referendum that led to Aboriginal people being counted in the census, and legislating in the states to remove discrimination on the basis of sexuality.

In 1989, when Puplick was shadow environment minister, the Coalition adopted a target of a 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2000 — well ahead of any commitment by Labor. Who could have imagined that a third of a century later, some Liberals and Nationals are still arguing the toss about human-induced climate change and whether we even need targets? Or that the Liberals would revisit the option of nuclear power, which is no more popular now and makes even less sense given the low cost of renewables.

Of course, more important factors were responsible for the 1993 election loss, including Hewson’s complex and ambitious Fightback! package, which included a GST and significant changes to Medicare. As well, Keating’s formidable political demolition skills exposed Hewson’s limitations as a campaigner.

Nevertheless, Puplick’s key point had force: the Liberals couldn’t afford to write off the voters they had alienated. The same choice, on many of the same or similar issues, faces the party after this year’s election loss.

Despite Howard’s argument that the Liberal Party is a broad church, the moderates lost influence in the years he presided over the party. Now the teals have scythed through their already depleted ranks, defeating moderates Trent Zimmerman, Katie Allen, Dave Sharma, Jason Falinski, Tim Wilson and Celia Hammond, as well as taking out Josh Frydenberg.

Scott Morrison’s election strategy assumed he could find an electoral majority in the outer suburbs and regions, despite the Coalition’s negatives on climate change, women and government integrity. Indeed, he was prepared to alienate small “l” liberal voters by advancing the credentials of his handpicked candidate in the seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, and endorsing her criticisms of transgender rights. That failed both as a political wedge and as a strategy to attract conservative votes.

“It was a strategic, dog whistle–type manoeuvre to awaken culture war anxieties in outer-suburban seats,” said the Blueprint Institute, a think tank espousing classic liberalism, in its scathing post-election briefing. “Morrison was actively sacrificing the teal for the new dark blue.”

Yet Peter Dutton sees Morrison’s strategy as the way of the future, at least in broad terms. He says that 200,000 voters deserted the Liberal Party for the teals at the election compared with the 700,000 who switched to right-wing parties such as One Nation and the United Australia Party. His office didn’t respond to repeated requests for an explanation of these figures, which appear difficult to reconcile with the election results. “Our policies will be squarely aimed at the forgotten Australians,” Dutton said at his first news conference as leader, “in the suburbs, across regional Australia, the families and small businesses whose lot the Labor Party will have made more difficult.”

As for the teal seats, Dutton thinks that well-off voters can cope with higher petrol prices, whereas “people are putting $20 and $40 in their car because they can’t afford to fill up” in many of the areas he sees the Liberals representing.

One of Dutton’s predecessors, Tony Abbott, has his own instant history of the election result, perhaps tinged with schadenfreude over the losses by Liberal moderates. “This wasn’t actually a climate change election,” he argues. “The question is do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to appeal?”

Dutton told his party room that the opposition will announce a new target for emissions reduction before the next election. But he didn’t take what many thought was the obvious step — as advocated by Zimmerman and other moderates — of accepting Labor’s target of 43 per cent and moving on. Colleagues say he believes he will be able to link Labor’s climate policies to the rising cost of living.

Senate opposition leader Simon Birmingham, the senior parliamentary moderate, was reduced to tortuously arguing that he would have supported the 43 per cent target if it hadn’t been put into legislation, given that the legislation was unnecessary. Such is the price of party unity.

But Birmingham and other moderates have a very different interpretation of the election result from Dutton’s. Apart from the teal electorates themselves, Birmingham tells me, many other seats were lost to Labor and the Greens because of the party’s loss of “teal-type” voters. “To win those seats back we are going to have to reconcile with those voters and their concerns on issues of inclusion and climate ambition.”

He draws a contrast with the 2019 election, after parliament had resolved the issue of marriage equality “and there were no particular distractions being run in the culture war space. We were able to keep the focus relentlessly on the economy and tax, with Labor’s help, and we won. By 2022, having had internally divisive debates on religious discrimination and then the distraction of transgender issues, they just compounded a sense of intolerance that is out of step with large parts of Australia, particularly in those seats that we lost.”

Fellow moderate, NSW senator Andrew Bragg, emphasises that the Morrison government lost seats to Labor and the teals rather than to right-wing parties. “It is very clear that the fastest way back to government is to reclaim the Liberal heartland,” he tells me.

Bragg has calculated an average Liberal primary vote of 41 per cent in the (broadly defined) inner-city Sydney seats of Warringah, retained by independent Zali Stegall; North Sydney, Wentworth and Mackellar, all won by teals; Reid and Bennelong, won by Labor; and Bradfield and Berowra, held by Liberals despite significant swings against them. To replace these eight seats, he says, would require winning in areas of western Sydney such as Bankstown, Parramatta and Liverpool, where the average Liberal primary vote was around 23 per cent. “It is a pipedream,” he says. “Our primary vote is simply too low.”

By contrast, lifting the Liberal vote by as little as six percentage points to 47 per cent in seats closer to the city should be enough for a win after preferences. “The idea that we abandon heartland seats and not represent people in the inner cities would be the first time the Liberal Party has sought not to represent a large part of the community. It is a politically innumerate approach.” And the story is similar in Melbourne and Brisbane, he says. “All up, it would be giving up on sixteen current or former Liberal seats.”

An analysis by Ross Stitt, a lawyer and political scientist, supports Bragg’s broad point by using the twenty electorates with the highest Yes vote in 2017 for marriage equality as a proxy for socially liberal values. The Liberals held ten of those seats in the 2016 federal election and eight in 2019 but lost all of them to teals, Labor and the Greens this year.

Despite Bragg’s figures, winning back teal seats is likely to be a challenge. Independent MPs in recent periods generally have increased their margins at subsequent elections. Labor has an interest in encouraging its supporters to vote strategically, as it did at this year’s election, to help the teals get re-elected, since it has no prospect of winning those seats itself. Ultimately, events over the next few years, including the performance of the Albanese government, the Dutton opposition and the teals themselves, will determine the future of these seats.

Bragg sees opportunities. “The first thing you need is a philosophy of live and let live,” he says. “Most people aren’t into weirdo culture war issues.” Another requirement is a distinctive economic policy — and this is where he sees openings, given Labor’s “vested interests” through its links with trade unions. He cites the Albanese government’s likely reintroduction of collective bargaining and steps to reduce the transparency of superannuation funds. “So we have to be bold in industrial relations, superannuation and tax. I don’t think we did enough on economic policy in the last election.”

Bragg’s views are echoed by influential Liberals outside parliament. David Cross, chief executive of the Blueprint Institute and a former head of policy and chief-of-staff to NSW Liberal education ministers, makes the point that Tony Abbott seems to have missed: every one of the teals ran campaigns attacking the Coalition’s weak position on climate change. “They pitched themselves as disaffected small ‘l’ liberals,” he says, “and the electorate responded.”

Cross believes that Liberals, “as friends of the free market,” know that liberalism is best placed to enable conservation and climate action. “They know we should be supporting the private sector’s desire to speed up the exit of coal from the grid rather than forcing energy companies to keep open loss-making coal-fired power stations — a perfect example of government overreach if there ever was one.”

Not facing the restraints applying to federal MPs, the Blueprint chief makes another point: there is no alternative. “Even in an alternate reality where Matt Canavan is prime minister, you are going to end up with net zero because you will be dragged there by the global economy. There is no conceivable world where in fifty years from now we won’t be in a net zero economy. That being the case, do we want to get the wooden spoon or take the opportunities?”

The concern of small “l” liberals like Cross is that the party has broken away from its moorings to become reactionary rather than liberal. “Whether you look at the treatment of LGBTQI students at school or the environment or even tax and fiscal reform, which policies in the party’s platform can you point to as being consistent with the philosophy on which the party was founded?” he asks. “You can see why the party has bled votes — to the teals because it is not a liberal party and in some other seats because it is not a conservative party.”

Rather than shifting to the populist right, says Cross, the party “must re-engage with classical liberalism and stop listening to those who bastardise their party’s philosophy to shroud Luddite attitudes towards progress and veil naked bigotry towards people that make them uncomfortable.”

As for the outer-suburban strategy, Cross calls it the “mythical base.” The idea that the party needn’t focus on winning back teal seats is “ludicrously misguided.” These are areas where people have voted for the Liberals all their lives, he points out — until May this year. “As recently as three or four years ago, the Coalition was holding these seats by massive margins. The idea that this [loss of support] has suddenly become a long-term trend, I don’t buy at all. What it does show is that the federal party, particularly under Morrison, has just diverted so far from these voters’ policy priorities. It shows the extent to which they have abandoned liberalism.”

The moderates’ arguments find support in the re-election in May of Tasmanian Liberal Bridget Archer, who defied the national voting trend to secure a small positive swing in the ultra-marginal seat of Bass. Archer stood up to Morrison and crossed the floor in support of an integrity commission and LGBTQI rights, and since the election has voted in favour of Labor’s legislation for the 43 per cent emissions reduction target.

Might the NSW Coalition government be the model for the federal party to follow? True, it has become mired in all sorts of scandals this year. And premier Dominic Perrottet hails from the conservative wing of the party, though the moderates say he shares many of their concerns, particularly over the federal party’s resort to populism.

But when it comes to policies, the government in Macquarie Street arguably does set a positive example. “The policy platform of the NSW government has been really successful,” argues Cross, citing moves on climate change and other issues that make it less likely to be threatened by a teal wave.

One answer to the question in the title of Puplick’s book, Is the Party Over?, came two years after its publication with John Howard’s landslide win against the Keating government — the start of four terms in office. Howard didn’t win by embracing moderate policies; rather, he focused on neutralising negatives, including his party’s hostility towards Medicare and his own fears about Asian immigration. By offering the smallest possible target, he got out of the way of voters who, in the words of Queensland Labor premier Wayne Goss, were waiting on their verandas with baseball bats to deal with the Keating government. Howard exploited the sentiment by aiming, he said, for an Australia that was “comfortable and relaxed.”

When the electoral pendulum swings, it can knock over everything in its path, including perceptions of electoral vulnerabilities. But a vote overwhelmingly against a government does not mean an opposition should forget about adopting policies that appeal to voters.

Despite preaching the gospel of the Liberal Party as a broad church, Howard often acted as though he didn’t mean it. But he was pragmatic enough to sway with the electoral wind. As opposition leader he appointed Puplick shadow environment minister because he saw the traction the issue was gaining with voters. He allowed a conscience vote to overturn health minister Tony Abbott’s ban on the RU486 abortion pill — an issue that had split the Coalition parties. In his last term of government he endorsed an emissions trading scheme to tackle climate change. It was the ideologues in the party, led by Abbott, who took a different path.

Puplick’s basic point remains clear and valid: a party seeking government can’t afford policies that put so many voters offside. As another prominent Liberal put it to me, “Will we win an election on reframing these issues? Perhaps not, but we have to stop losing votes on them.” •

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Nonetheless, Morrison is hoping the setback will only be temporary and he can soon return to his promise to protect Australians from big government while letting rip “can-do capitalism.” He is courting voters who opposed major public health restrictions during the pandemic by arguing that it is time for government to step out of the way.

Despite a post-Covid spin, that rhetoric isn’t really new. Morrison went to the last election making a populist promise to protect ordinary Australians from a big, intrusive, high-taxing Labor government. His current arguments are largely a post-Covid variation on that old neoliberal, pro-market theme — though, given his criticism of official intrusion, it is ironic that his government has long exhibited an authoritarian tinge, especially when it comes to groups and perspectives it disagrees with.

Those Australians who hoped the Coalition might have learned from the economic stimulus measures it introduced during the pandemic will be sadly disappointed, particularly when it comes to the economic and social benefits that flowed from increasing unemployment benefits. The government even briefly offered free childcare. It was all a long way from the severely restricted role the prime minister sees government playing in helping rebuild the Australian economy after the pandemic, never mind tackling major issues such as climate change.

But the Coalition isn’t alone in turning to the past. Labor has been casting around for previous economic models too. Early in the pandemic Labor shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers evoked the Curtin and Chifley government’s Keynesian postwar reconstruction plans of the early 1940s: a model that sees a greater role for the state in a mixed economy than does Morrison’s can-do capitalism.

More recently, Chalmers has also been evoking British Labour’s Tony Blair by seeking to brand Labor as the “party of aspiration.” Such a flirtation isn’t new, as Labor leaders Simon Crean and Mark Latham demonstrated twenty years ago. But Chalmers should be cautious, given that those previous evocations of Blair didn’t end well for the Australian party.

Nonetheless, following an inspiring video call with Blair, and building on his own arguments, Chalmers has highlighted the role that technology can play in improving the economic wellbeing of citizens. Two decades ago, the Blair government optimistically promised that Britain would once again be a world-leading economy via its technological prowess in the information revolution. Paul Keating had embraced the opportunities of the new information economy years before Blair. New technologies can indeed bring great benefits, but they also risk deepening inequality — a risk that Chalmers, like earlier Labor figures including Keating, may well have underestimated.

It’s back to the future in other ways, too. Chalmers’s electoral focus on the suburbs has echoes of Mark Latham’s period as a Labor politician, when he published a book called From the Suburbs. Like Chalmers, former Labor leader Kim Beazley also pledged to respond to the issues that middle Australians are discussing around their kitchen tables.

With its cautious, small-target strategy, Labor appears to have backed away from Shorten-era hints that it might address some of the industrial relations policy failures of previous Labor governments, including Keating-era enterprise bargaining policies and the Rudd–Gillard government’s outlawing of pattern bargaining on an industry-wide basis. While Labor has been loath to acknowledge the problem explicitly, its own policies actually contributed to the wage stagnation that Labor now pledges to tackle.

So the industrial relations challenge for Labor is not just to deal with Coalition policies but also to tackle its own past. While it has kept the Shorten-era promise to tackle precarious work — an issue that the pandemic has brought into even greater prominence — in other respects it often seems to be returning to an earlier model. In its attempts to repair the damage that Shorten’s attacks on the big end of town inflicted on the party’s relations with business, it has ended up placing less emphasis on issues of economic equality.

For his part, Morrison is threatening to make waterfront industrial relations a major issue, echoing the Howard government’s targeting of the Maritime Union of Australia more than twenty years ago. The government has also been returning to past Coalition election strategies in its suggestions that Labor is soft on China.

Culture-war issues are also being raised, most recently with the introduction of the government’s religious freedom bill. While this legislation is close to Morrison’s heart, he also sees it as an opportunity to wedge Labor. He has incorrectly implied that the lack of protection against religious discrimination — alongside laws against sexual or racial discrimination — represents a failure of the left. But it was conservative Christians who campaigned for years against laws to protect religious freedom, including when the previous Labor government considered introducing such protections. Those Christians were concerned about these protections extending to non-Christian religions and the possible implications for Christian religious instruction and state aid to church schools. The problem for the left lies not in protecting people of faith against religious discrimination but in dealing with arguments that “religious freedom” should enable believers to discriminate against others.

True, predicting the political future is even harder than usual. Time and time again the virus has refused to cooperate with politicians’ best-laid plans. But those who hoped that the post-Covid world would see a radically “better normal” seem destined to be disappointed. In the lead-up to the next election, both Labor and Liberal have so far reverted unimaginatively to previous policy perspectives. Despite the pandemic, much of the next election seems likely to be fought on familiar ideological ground. •

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Marshall has in his favour the fact that South Australians (like their counterparts in most states) are generally reluctant to throw out first-term governments. Bucking that trend usually involves significant missteps, as Campbell Newman showed in Queensland between 2012 and 2015. Indeed, you have to go back to 1982 to find South Australia’s last one-term government — the Liberals under David Tonkin, who lost to Labor under John Bannon. In what may prove to be another irony, the one-term government before that one was headed by Marshall’s political hero, the Liberal moderate Steele Hall, who served as premier from 1968 to 1970.

Marshall and the Liberals have also generally had a “good” pandemic. South Australia has avoided any significant outbreaks, and community transmission is now close to zero. The state’s last lockdown, in July, lasted just seven days. South Australians have generally supported Marshall’s quick closing of the borders to the outbreak states, and his government has been ably assisted by a well-regarded chief public health officer and a well-regarded police commissioner.

So far so good. So why are the wheels coming off?

First, there’s the fact that South Australia recently hit the national headlines — a rare occurrence — for all the wrong reasons. Prompting references to a banana republic, a parliamentary “coup” orchestrated by independent crossbenchers replaced Liberal speaker Josh Teague with independent MP Dan Cregan, a former Liberal. The Legislative Council is currently considering a bill to change South Australia’s constitution to ensure that the speaker will always be “independent.” (The bill, which has already been passed by the House of Assembly, requires the speaker to sever all party ties.)

Cregan, a first-term MP, hails from the Liberals’ conservative wing. He lives in the affluent seat of Kavel, in the Adelaide Hills, which overlaps with the federal seat of Mayo, held by Centre Alliance MP Rebekha Sharkie. His tumultuous journey to the speakership embodies much of the plight of the South Australian Liberals.

Cregan surprised Marshall earlier this month by indicating that he might step down after one term, potentially returning to the law. Marshall persuaded him to stay on, only for him to resign from the Liberals to become an independent shortly afterwards. Cregan says he was increasingly dismayed by the government’s lack of a plan to deal with population growth in the Hills.

Marshall’s troubles have been brewing for some time. At the 2018 election, his party won twenty-five seats to Labor’s nineteen in the forty-seven-seat chamber. After a series of scandals, intrigues and Liberal Party missteps, six independent MPs now sit in the lower house, four of them disaffected or disgraced Liberals. Sam Duluk was suspended and faced criminal charges after alleged inappropriate behaviour at a Christmas function in 2019. Fraser Ellis was caught up in the scandal over country allowances that wreaked political havoc for Marshall in 2020, with three ministers and the Legislative Council president eventually resigning. Ex-Liberal Troy Bell had won Mount Gambier in 2018 as an independent after being charged with theft and dishonesty.

If we pull back and take a wider view of Marshall’s troubles it’s possible to identify two key underlying problems for the centre right of politics: factional and political fragmentation, and, crucially, an ideological crisis. Tribalism and factional discord have arguably been the defining traits of the state Liberals. Broadly split into two camps — the moderates and the conservatives — they have a long history of backstabbing and factional tension. The party’s two most prominent leaders, Marshall and his attorney-general Vickie Chapman, lead the moderate faction, but the conservatives have no clear leadership. Stephan Knoll, once the rising star of the conservative wing, is quitting SA politics after his own scandals.

The conservatives are rattled by the dominance of the moderates. Chapman, arguably the party’s strongest proponent of social liberalism, has led the charge with major victories — the decriminalisation of abortion, and assisted dying/ euthanasia legislation — that no Labor attorney-general has sought or achieved. The conservatives, flailing in the face of this shift to moderate liberalism, have turned to recruiting members from the state’s Pentecostal churches to shore up factional support. Marshall seems ill-equipped to manage these divisions.

These issues reflect a wider crisis of centre-right politics. Ironically, the situation in South Australia is the reverse of the situation in Canberra. Since the bungled leadership of Malcolm Turnbull, Liberal moderates seem to have very little clout at the federal level, and very few policy wins.

Two South Australians exemplify the political vacuum at the heart of modern-day moderate liberalism. The often amusing Christopher Pyne — who joked about his privileged reputation during his farewell speech by mentioning that he once had to get his own lemon for a gin and tonic — left no tangible policy legacy. The more low-key Simon Birmingham has played a key role in a government that has overseen robodebt, the carpark grant scandal and the repeal of the medevac bill, and that has failed to introduce an integrity commission.

Moreover, the moderates have not been able to shift the Coalition’s needle on climate policy. The conservatives, meanwhile, have wielded significant veto power. The hollowness of moderate liberalism is exemplified by Simon Birmingham’s voting record (which is, of course, shaped by having to maintain party discipline), which includes voting against a carbon price, against a rise in the Youth Allowance and against a constitutionally enshrined First Nations voice.

These examples raise the question of what moderate liberalism is actually for. The British liberal thinker T.H. Green drew an important distinction between positive and negative freedom. Rather than just freedom from government control, liberals need to foster an enabling state that helps people to achieve their potential. The voting records of many Liberal moderates show no awareness of the distinction.

In a new collection of essays, Riding the Populist Wave, political scientists Tim Bale and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser examine the crisis of the mainstream right in Europe. At its heart is the growing fragmentation of party systems, which in turn reflects new social cleavages and shifts in values.

The parallel with Australia is striking. But here — nationally, in South Australia, and in other states and territories — the key symptom of the crisis is not the rise of new populist challengers (as in Europe) but the growing fragmentation and fraying of the liberal and conservative traditions. It is striking, for example, that Cory Bernardi was unable to revitalise conservatism by joining forces with another South Australian creation, Family First.

Though Steven Marshall’s problems in South Australia are driven by longstanding factional rivalries, they also reflect a wider crisis on the centre right. How that will play out when South Australians next vote is no doubt uppermost in the premier’s mind. •

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For almost half a century, the well-organised moderates have fought tenaciously to limit the influence of the state’s hard-right faction, which they dubbed “the Uglies” when it first came to prominence in the 1970s. The moderates’ grip on the party’s powerful administrative apparatus ensured that the leadership was never in thrall to the right, and kept the premier’s job — from Nick Greiner and John Fahey through to Barry O’Farrell and, more recently, Gladys Berejiklian — safely out of the right’s hands.

Mike Baird, who succeeded O’Farrell in 2014, emerged as a compromise candidate when the right effectively blocked the moderates’ choice of Berejiklian, then deputy leader, because of her prominence as a factional activist. While nominally a moderate, Baird’s strong Christian credentials and espousal of “family values” (read anti–marriage equality) won him support from the right. But Berejiklian’s solid performance as treasurer under Baird made it impossible for the right to block her rise to the top when he unexpectedly resigned in 2017. It also lacked a credible candidate.

Perrottet, as deputy leader and treasurer, has by and large performed strongly, despite his questionable management of the workers compensation body, icare. In the absence of a single stand-out moderate challenger, he is likely to take the top job, with moderate Stuart Ayres as deputy leader.

The NSW Liberals are, and always have been, a cantankerous bunch, their character deeply rooted in a distinct path of evolution. In Victoria, until very recently, the Liberal Party was the political establishment, holding office more often than not. Its web of patronage was extensive and deep, the names of old money and old families — like the Baillieus and the Napthines — woven seamlessly into the fabric of political life. This was the home of Victorian radicalism, where middle-class liberals like Alfred Deakin introduced far-reaching, progressive reforms. An integral part of their overall social package was tariff protection, which had benefits for manufacturer and worker alike.

New South Wales was different. The pastoral ascendancy had set the economy off on a different trajectory, that of free trade, and the state’s political and social development took a corresponding course. Indeed, so divergent were the dominant ideologies of the two states that they threatened to derail the process of federation. Liberals in Victoria looked to a constituency of both working- and middle-class interests, but in New South Wales it was the nascent Labor Party, rising from the bitter strikes and depression of the early 1890s, that began to gather strength among the working class. Labor was much slower in gaining a foothold in Victoria.

From 1909, when Australia’s two-party system became more or less fixed, the demographics of New South Wales heavily favoured the Labor Party. It first assumed office in 1910, lost it after the party split of 1916, then regained it in 1920–22, 1925–27 and 1930–32, when Jack Lang’s handiwork saw it banished. William McKell’s revival of the party in 1941 saw Labor in office for an unbroken twenty-four years, and again for long spells in 1976–88 and, most recently, 1995–2011.

The situation in Victoria is almost the reverse, with Labor enjoying only brief periods in office until 1982–92 and 1999–2010. Just as Labor dominated in New South Wales for an era, so too did the Liberals in Victoria for twenty-seven unbroken years, from 1955 to 1982.

These sharp differences in opportunities to exercise political power and build networks of patronage account for discernible differences in the character of conservative politics in the two larger states. An establishment party in Melbourne, well-entrenched and confident, contrasts with an outgroup in Sydney, resentful and opportunistic. As the political scientist James Jupp observed almost sixty years ago, the NSW Liberals had “a right-wing ratbag character” and an “oppositional mentality” that was absent in Victoria. The ever-present danger, he wrote, was that without strong leadership and the prospect of electoral success “instability in leadership and severe factionalism” would result.

Only three NSW Liberals have led the party to victory from opposition in eighty years: Bob Askin in 1965, Nick Greiner in 1988 and Barry O’Farrell in 2011. All three came to the leadership after tribal warfare had felled a series of predecessors in quick succession. Both Askin and Greiner offered what the party desperately needed — strong leadership coupled with the likelihood of imminent electoral success. Barry O’Farrell’s case was different: he came to office as an uneasy compromise and had to wait until the Labor government imploded under its own steam before he gained the premiership.

In a sense, O’Farrell never dampened the tribal fires in the way that Greiner and Askin had. While he might well have been the architect of his own downfall, he was never really secure. To understand that insecurity means understanding the complex network of tribal allegiances that make up the NSW Liberal Party, which have now also become part of the fabric of the federal party.

John Howard was a typical product of the NSW Liberals. Growing up in a small business environment in suburban Sydney, he saw Labor’s shadow everywhere: not just in the state government, which it ran with the trade unions, but also in local government, the churches, the legal profession, the judiciary and even business. Labor was the ubiquitous enemy that had to be defeated; it was not just a political opponent, its very culture was toxic and needed to be eliminated from the body politic and public life in general.

It is a telling insight into the NSW Liberal mind that of almost 3000 party members polled in a survey in 2014 by Macquarie University’s business and economics faculty, 89 per cent strongly agreed that among their reasons for joining the party was a desire to “to keep Labor out” (compared with 55 per cent wishing “to help local candidates,” for example).

In a tribal sense, keeping Labor out means not resembling Labor in any way (a criticism the party’s right wing makes of its moderate opponents). The basic argument of the moderates, little changed down the years, is that the right makes the party unelectable by making it unappealing to “soft” Labor voters, a view that many on the right, in its various sub-tribes, see as akin to apostasy. But pragmatists on the right see the logic in that argument and are prepared to tolerate a leader of moderate inclinations under certain circumstances. O’Farrell, though formally unaligned, was tolerated in precisely this way.

The moderates are broadly though not entirely homogeneous. The right is divided on a number of issues, with marked tensions between social conservatives, committed Christians and social libertarians. Across these divisions, it is further split into three distinct sub-groups which, for want of a better label, comprise a soft right, centre right and hard right, the last dubbed “the Taliban” by the moderates and largely taking over from the Uglies. Their involvement in branch recruitment and preselection contests is seen as more organised and focused than that of the moderates, which gives them a disproportionate say in party matters.

All of which brings us to Dominic Perrottet, the man likely to be premier. The third eldest of twelve children, Perrottet was instrumental in dislodging the moderates from control of the Young Liberals a little over a decade and a half ago, and served as the organisation’s president in 2005. He was a protégé of right-wing powerbroker David Clarke, sat on the party’s powerful state executive from 2008 to 2011, and entered parliament in 2010.

His elevation to premier, which has John Howard’s support, will strike a blow at the moderates. His influence will be quickly felt in a practical sense, for he now has the chance to give effect to his opposition to a conscience vote for Liberals when parliament debates the forthcoming bill on assisted dying. His is the only state not yet to have legislated on the issue.

The impact in the federal arena will most likely be felt in the scramble for preselections for next year’s federal election. The moderates have blamed the right for having lost Tony Abbott’s old seat of Warringah to an independent, and with more independent challenges flagged for hitherto safe Liberal seats, factional issues will be clearly in view.

As for the state moderates, they will face an existential crisis, their very raison d’être having been called into question by a series of events: Malcolm Turnbull’s toppling by the right, Scott Morrison’s increasing rightward drift, most recently marked by the promotion of Alex Hawke into cabinet, and — if it happens — Perrottet’s rise to the state leadership. •

The post State of exception appeared first on Inside Story.

Some foreign ministers go on to be ennobled as governor-general: Richard Casey, Paul Hasluck and Hayden. But only one in living memory, William McMahon, sprang back from this political sidetrack into the prime ministership.

Present incumbent Marise Payne is notable for an absence of perceptible leadership ambition and what many say is an excessive aversion to the limelight. She is also part of a dwindling remnant of small-l liberals in the Liberal Party. Oddly, though, this has made her useful to Scott Morrison as he flounders around in gender and sexual violence issues. In March he made her chair of a new cabinet committee on the status of women, referring to her as “prime minister for women,” while making it clear he was still in charge.

Once, Payne had people wondering whether she had the makings of a prime minister. In 2001, four years into her first Senate term, clever, articulate and still only thirty-seven, she was asked by Radio National’s Terry Lane whether she would jump to the House of Representatives to advance her career. “The sort of Liberal Party that I would lead, I would hope would be a very inclusive Liberal Party,” she said, adding she was happy enough helping constituents sort out “issues and problems.” Just as well, for she was already on the outer in the Liberal Party.

She had been deputy to lawyer–financier Malcolm Turnbull during the Australian Republican Movement’s failed Yes campaign at the 1999 referendum, and had been upbraided by John Howard and Tony Abbott for this “conflict of interest.” As she observed ruefully at the Lowy Institute in 2018, “It may explain my extremely well-developed professional career as a backbencher in the Howard government.”

Further episodes didn’t endear her to Howard. As chair of the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee she declared one of his government’s proposed anti-terror laws “a very serious incursion into the way in which we currently expect to be able to live our lives in Australia.” Together with other Coalition moderates, she managed to have the legislation modified.

From her maiden speech in 1997 onwards she spoke of her concerns about refugees, the stolen generations, HIV sufferers and other minorities. Her foreign trips took her to places like Dili to observe the East Timorese independence referendum or Nepal to see Tibetans arriving across the Himalayas. As Norman Abjorensen noted in a 2008 profile for Inside Story, all of this meant her career under Howard was “a swim upstream.”

Howard embodied the hardline laissez-faire views of the Liberal Party’s NSW right, in the end going beyond the bounds of public acceptability with his WorkChoices legislation. Abjorensen contrasted this approach with Victoria’s Liberals, historically more secure and imbued with a certain noblesse oblige.

With members of the intolerant religious right stacking branches in New South Wales, Payne’s place on the Senate ticket was always under threat. She clung on in third place behind the right’s Helen Coonan and the top-ranked National. In a speech to the Sydney Institute in November 2008, the year after Howard’s defeat, she excoriated the party’s right for straying from the liberalism of Robert Menzies and showing “heartlessness” towards refugees.

Payne started to come in from the cold under opposition leaders Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull, both moderate NSW Liberals, who awarded her junior shadow portfolios in Indigenous affairs and foreign aid. Then, with experienced and talented women, or any women at all, in short supply in the Coalition, Abbott gave her the thankless human services portfolio. Later in 2015, following Abbott’s ousting by Turnbull, she became defence minister.

In that job, she gained accolades for her performance in question time and committees, and for her engagement across party lines. “I’ve always been quite impressed with her,” says crossbench senator Rex Patrick. “She never seems to be rattled by questions. She always seems to be well briefed and prepared.”

Momentous decisions were made  in the portfolio during her three years. Twelve French-designed submarines were ordered,  at a cost initially put at $50 billion (the troubled project is now expected to cost $90 billion), with an extra $10 billion to keep the six existing Collins-class submarines operating until they arrive. Nine British frigates, also still on the drawing board, were ordered at a cost of $35 billion, now blown out to $45 billion.

Few defence analysts believe Payne guided these decisions or questioned the advice leading to them. To critics like Patrick, a former submariner, it was a case of defence chiefs with little project experience selling a grand leap into the future to politicians with even less grasp of technology, warfare and industry. “I would say Payne presided over a number of decisions, particularly in naval shipbuilding, that will haunt Australia for years to come,” says Patrick, who adds that she should have picked up on very early signs that the French submarine deal was not going well.

In his memoir, A Bigger Picture, Turnbull mentions working with Payne on the 2016 defence white paper, though he details only his own interventions in the drafting. She was a “calm, knowledgeable and considered” minister, he writes. “But she lacked confidence in her own considerable ability and wouldn’t get out enough in the media to promote our Defence Industry Plan, which is why I later appointed Christopher Pyne minister for Defence Industry.”

Morrison’s dethroning of Turnbull in August 2018 saw Julie Bishop exit cabinet and later parliament. Needing another woman in his senior ranks, Morrison appointed Linda Reynolds, a major-general in the Army Reserve, as defence minister and made Payne foreign affairs minister.

Payne was hardly his cup of tea. Morrison had been the party’s NSW state director during the years she was stuck on the backbench and at risk of losing nomination. But she was a safe pair of hands who had kept any objections to refugee policy to herself since becoming a minister.

The contrast between Payne and her predecessor could hardly be greater. Bishop’s high-profile travels, lycra-clad early-morning jogs, daring haute couture and Paspaley pearls helped keep her in the public eye. Eight years older than Payne, she had once practised as a barrister (Payne had been a political staffer) and was well suited to the prosecutorial role she assumed after the downing of a Malaysian airliner by Russian-backed Ukrainian forces.

Far from the VIP tent, Payne remains a somewhat reclusive figure anchored in the middle and outer suburbs of Sydney, where she grew up as the daughter of an accountant. After attending Methodist Ladies College, she joined the Liberal Club at the University of NSW, aged seventeen, having just started her arts–law degrees. She has said the Liberals were the “natural choice” for her. These days, with her electorate office in Parramatta, she calls herself “senator for Western Sydney” rather than the constitutionally correct senator for New South Wales. Her home is in the Penrith state electorate of her partner since 2007, Stuart Ayres, a minister in Gladys Berejiklian’s state government.

From the outset, it was clear that a large part of her current job would involve cleaning up after her leader. During a by-election caused by Turnbull’s resignation from parliament, Morrison decided to try to appeal to the large Jewish population in the Wentworth electorate by announcing Australia would follow Donald Trump’s example and transfer its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Protests erupted in Indonesia and Malaysia, and farm exporters got worried. With backing from Payne’s department, the government called in senior foreign policy and trade figures — former ASIO and defence department head Dennis Richardson, former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange, former defence force head Angus Houston, former prime minister’s department head Michael Thawley, and former Nationals leader John Anderson — to advise. All but Thawley said the move was a bad idea. In the end, a compromise statement said the move would be to “West Jerusalem,” not the united city claimed by Israel, and wouldn’t take place (except for a defence and trade office) until a settlement was reached with the Palestinians, who claim East Jerusalem as their capital. “We ended up with the extraordinary formula which is exactly the same as Vladimir Putin’s,” says one retired diplomat.

A year later, in October 2019, Morrison went down another Trumpian pathway. “We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia,” Morrison told a Lowy Institute dinner. “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community and, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” He ordered Payne to do an “audit” of Australia’s membership of international bodies.

Her department complied according to the classic Yes, Prime Minister script. As Payne told ANU’s National Security College in June last year, it found that the hundred or so international agencies were “extremely important for Australia in terms of advancing our national interests and promoting and protecting our values.” She thanked Morrison for guiding her department to this conclusion. “We couldn’t have made that assessment without the multilateral audit.”

Beyond these defensive moves, Payne is not getting many plaudits. She is perceived by some as lacking energy and visibility, both in dealing with the world outside and in explaining the world to Australians. But figures in foreign policy circles are reluctant to talk about her on the record: they tend to admire her personally and think she has a hard row to hoe in this government, and they have contact with her in various forums.

“She does no harm, but she doesn’t do much good,” says one veteran of the Canberra political scene. “She has good instincts and a lot to offer but has she really pulled the government in a positive direction on very much?” asks an international relations academic influential in foreign policy circles. “Probably not.” The academic thinks that Penny Wong, her opposite number in Labor, would have made a bigger splash outside Australia and got the Australian public more engaged on international issues, had the 2019 election gone the other way.

As an example of actual harm, many point to Payne’s call in April last year for an “independent” inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Under questioning from David Speers on ABC’s Insiders she suggested China had not been fully transparent and questioned whether the World Health Organization was the right body to carry out such an inquiry, given this would be “a bit poacher and gamekeeper.”

She was veering into Trumpland, and Morrison made it worse two days later by declaring the investigators would need “weapons inspector” powers.

Relations with Beijing were already heading south. As the eminent former Fairfax editor Max Suich wrote in a powerful analysis in the Australian Financial Review in May, two of Canberra’s most powerful figures, names undisclosed, told a closed-door Lowy panel in September 2017 that Chinese interference needed to be confronted. Turnbull was already preparing the foreign interference laws he would present to parliament that December with the declaration, in bad Mandarin, that Australia was “standing up” — a cheap take on Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic in 1949. He soon announced that Huawei would be excluded from Australia’s 5G mobile network, and began urging other security partners to follow suit.

In other words, getting “out in front” of Australia’s allies, as Suich put it, in “calling out” and “pushing back” against Chinese interference and infiltration, began well before Morrison, though he continued and intensified it. The bill came in over the following months, with China blocking some $20 billion in imports from Australia on various pretexts. An international Covid inquiry did get launched in September, on European initiative and under WHO auspices, with both China and Australia voting in favour.

It was an own goal for Payne and Morrison. “She ended up holding the can for the Covid inquiry and I have no idea where it came from,” says the international relations scholar. “Was she ordered to do it, or did she actually want to do it? But that was a diplomacy fail from my perspective. We could have achieved the same objective without what became the consequences. That is what diplomacy is about: finding intelligent ways to negotiate or persuade, to get what you want, without the negative consequence.”

Three months after her inquiry call came Payne’s finest hour as foreign minister. More blunt than diplomatic, it recalled the Love Actually moment when Hugh Grant’s British prime minister rebuffs a sleazy US president. She was in the United States with defence minister Reynolds for the annual AUSMIN talks with their American counterparts, a week after US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had made a speech overturning decades of policy by declaring the Chinese Communist Party’s rule illegitimate.

Payne pointedly refused to back Pompeo’s call for allies to help roll back communism in China. “The secretary’s positions are his own,” she said at a joint press conference, standing beside Pompeo. “Australia’s position is our own.”

Back in Australia, Morrison continued to spring surprises. Anxious for a free-trade agreement with Britain post-Brexit, he agreed to Boris Johnson’s request that British working holiday-makers be exempted from the eighty-eight-day farm labour requirement to renew their visas. Then, to cover up the resulting fall in numbers in this highly exploitable group, he hastily agreed to a long-rejected push by the Nationals and the farm lobby for a new agricultural work visa for Southeast Asians, a recipe for future scandals affecting vital foreign relationships. As with the Jerusalem announcement, there was no sign of prior consultation with the foreign affairs minister.

If Payne has used her parliamentary seniority and rank in cabinet to push back on asylum seekers and other policies she finds too harsh, most outside observers can see little sign of it. The exception is an attempt, ahead of a feared Taliban return to power in Kabul, to persuade Home Affairs to grant asylum faster and less unwillingly to Afghans who worked with Australian forces and agencies. She was also said to be against the early withdrawal of Australia’s embassy.

Her efforts to support Australians in trouble are also noted. Freeing the Melbourne University academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert from jail in Iran last November required a complicated deal worked out by former ASIS chief Nick Warner, one-time ambassador in Tehran. He arranged for Moore-Gilbert to be exchanged for three convicted Iranian terrorists being held in jail in Bangkok, rewarding Thai prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha with a new “strategic partnership” with Australia — much-appreciated Western support for a military-backed leader who was vigorously suppressing anti-royalist demonstrators. Her concern for Sean Turnell, the jailed economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, is one reason she is holding off applying sanctions to the coup leaders in Myanmar.

On deeper policy, though, she is quite isolated, with Simon Birmingham the only other notable moderate in a cabinet stacked with punitive hard-right figures like former home affairs and now defence minister Peter Dutton and immigration minister Alex Hawke, who once worked for NSW religious-right powerbroker David Clarke.

This April she travelled to Wellington in a successful attempt to persuade her counterpart, Nanaia Mahuta, that New Zealand should stand closer to Australia in facing China. The NZ trade minister had earlier suggested Canberra try more “diplomacy,” and Mahuta questioned whether the Five Eyes intelligence pact was the right forum for a broader meeting of minds on the rise of China.

On this issue, Payne seems to have had little help from the punishers in the cabinet. The deportation of New Zealanders after even a one-year jail term has seen people raised from infancy in Australia (some of them steeped in Australian bikie culture and other criminal networks) dumped in their country of birth. Initiated by Morrison when he was immigration minister and ramped up by Dutton — who calls it “taking out the trash” — these “section 501” deportations have badly frayed the trans-Tasman relationship. To them have been added increasing numbers of “section 116” deportations, which require no criminal conviction at all but simply what one official calls the “I don’t like the look of you test.”

“To be fair, it’s a long-term problem, not Payne’s,” says the international relations academic. “Foreign ministers haven’t done enough to put their perspective strongly, to win the arguments in cabinet, to protect their department and make sure it’s funded properly. Foreign Affairs and Trade has continuously lost those arguments — the influence arguments, the funding. It just doesn’t have anything like the influence it used to have. You might ask: is that the minister’s fault or is the minister’s lack of influence a symptom of that?”

This is a shame, the academic adds, “because if you look at Marise’s parliamentary career there is just so much to like here. She is someone who genuinely believes in human rights and democratic processes, the machinery of good government. God, she stands out in the current government!”

Could anyone else have done any better? Probably not Julie Bishop. She was humiliated by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi early in her tenure, after Canberra protested against China’s declaration of an air defence identification zone in the East China Sea, and spent her last two and a half years as foreign minister frozen out of Beijing. By May 2018, Geoff Raby, a former Australian ambassador in Beijing, was writing that Turnbull “needs to replace the foreign minister with someone better equipped for the demands of the job.”

“If it was someone who had the most conceivable amount of heft in the cabinet, the domestic and international connections, would he or she have done better than Payne has done in the time she’s had?” the academic asks, providing the answer: probably not, under Morrison. “In which case she’s doing her best in a situation where there’s very little room for her to do more.”

The recent departure of her departmental secretary Frances Adamson for the SA governorship raises new questions. Will the loss of this career-long China specialist further weaken the department’s already diminished voice and further worsen relations with China? “I wonder how much of what’s happened in Foreign Affairs is a result of Frances Adamson,” says Rex Patrick. “We’ll only find that out as Kathryn Campbell takes over.”

Campbell, a major-general in the Army Reserve, is the new Foreign Affairs secretary. As secretary of Social Services, she carried the can for the robodebt scandal, but she has no discernible foreign experience beyond a brief attachment to a Middle East army base. Though Payne is said to have got on well with her as human services minister, it is unclear whose choice she is and what was Morrison’s purpose in appointing, or agreeing to appoint, her. Some have seen it as further “militarisation” of foreign policy. Conversely, Campbell might have the bureaucratic infighting skills to take on the security establishment.

Will Payne still be there to benefit? Many of the remaining moderates in the Liberal Party headed for the exit at the 2019 election, not attracted by the opposition benches or more time in a Morrison government. Sometime in the next ten months, Payne’s own place in the Senate will be up for election. She must be pondering whether to give up on the party she joined as a teenage girl or, as Menzies used to say, “keep kicking against the pricks.” •

The post Quiet Australian appeared first on Inside Story.

A Voice embedded in the Constitution would allow Canberra to devolve power to local communities, says Bragg, and enable federal parliament to hear Indigenous advice on legislation, on the use of the Aboriginal flag, and on the integration of Indigenous culture into parliamentary processes and official ceremonies. The Voice could also work with the Productivity Commission to collect and analyse data, and could be “folded into” the parliamentary committee system.

But Bragg warns promoters of the Voice not to prescribe the “tabling provisions” of the Voice. Specifying that parliament will be obliged to hear and respond formally to the Voice’s advice might scare off potential Yes voters in the referendum, he advises. Let the parliament legislate its obligations to the Voice before submitting it to a referendum. The legislation could be passed within the parliamentary term, followed by a referendum during the next parliamentary term (which Bragg assumes will commence in 2022).

The other two demands of the Uluru Statement — “agreement-making” and “truth-telling” — worry Bragg more. He wouldn’t support agreement-making if that meant a national treaty covering land use, because land laws are a state responsibility. And, because Indigenous Australians are within the Australian polity, Australia can’t “treat” with them as if they were an external authority. On “truth-telling,” he believes we shouldn’t lose sight of the good in Australian history. A Makarrata Commission could help Australians learn more about the bad as well as the good in Australian history — through local history forums, and by giving more attention to Indigenous perspectives in school history classes and public cultural institutions.

Bragg’s book is aimed at those who vote Liberal and those who, as Liberal and National MPs, help determine the policies of the current federal government. He wants conservatives to be more idealistic and courageous. Constitutional recognition would not be “divisive,” he says: the Uluru Statement expresses the Indigenous desire to be included in the nation. Nor should we worry that recognition would further entrench the idea that Indigenous Australians are a different “race.” As he points out, the Constitution’s “race” power is what enables native title and other beneficial laws: “Whether we like it or not, race is part of our system.” Constitutional recognition of the Voice, he argues, will also ensure that the Indigenous affairs budget is more wisely spent.

Some conservatives believe that the Voice would be a third chamber of parliament, damaging our system of government. Bragg assures them that the Voice would put parliament under no obligations. In fact, he believes that nothing in the Uluru Statement should frighten conservatives, and much should inspire them. The Liberal Party’s history shows that it “can carry the big, substantial changes” in Indigenous affairs. Indeed, “we are the only hope. The only chance to deliver” on the Uluru Statement.

To gee-up his colleagues, Bragg devotes much of Buraadja to reminding Liberals of what they can be proud of. In 1962, the Menzies government gave all adult Indigenous Australians the right to vote in federal elections. In 1967, by endorsing two changes to the Constitution that were widely understood to reverse the exclusion of Indigenous Australians, the Holt government boosted the massive Yes vote in the referendum. In 1971, the Liberals chose Neville Bonner, the first federal Indigenous MP, to replace Dame Annabelle Rankin when she retired from the Senate. In 1976, the Fraser government legislated most of the Whitlam government’s bill to recognise Northern Territory Aboriginal people’s customary land rights. In 1998, the Howard government amended the Keating government’s Native Title Act, effectively securing it from any further conservative assault. In 1999 and 2007, Howard promoted recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution.

In this series of actions, Liberals have enacted the liberal principle that the rights of Indigenous Australians — to vote, to be respectfully included, to maintain possession of their property — must be guaranteed by the rule of law. The Native Title Act is emblematic of the liberalism that Bragg admires — a liberalism that recognises how Indigenous Australians, damaged by our colonial history, are entitled to some distinct rights. He is thus opposed to a liberalism that insists on a uniformity of rights among Australians.

Although supporters of the Uluru Statement should feel heartened by the existence of liberals like Bragg, it’s important to remember that the Liberal Party is not the sole or even the best guardian of liberalism. If we are to keep open our appreciation of the possibilities it creates, we need to question Bragg’s tendentious history. A more adequate account would argue that Australian liberalism, at its best, is the product of two dynamics: the interplay between the judiciary and the legislature, and the adversarial contest between the Labor and non-Labor parties.

Bragg’s celebration of the Howard government’s 1998 commitment to the Native Title Act demonstrates the problems of his partisan approach. Though he acknowledges that the Keating government legislated the Native Title Act, he doesn’t mention how in 1992–93 the Hewson-led opposition refused to countenance any national native title legislation. It was content to let state governments and the courts determine where native title remained and what rights it contained. So little does Bragg think of Keating’s negotiation of the Native Title Act that he claims “Keating did not make significant achievements in the [Indigenous] policy space.”

Yes he did. To understand why conservatives eventually had to embrace a federal framework for native title, we need to recall another piece of Labor legislation for which Bragg — I assume — would have great respect: the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. This was the act that made the High Court’s Mabo judgement impossible for legislators to ignore in 1992–93, for unless native title holders had been compensated for having their title extinguished by grants of title since October 1975 (when the act came into effect), such titles were racially discriminatory and arguably invalid once the High Court had recognised that native title continued in many parts of Australia.

The Keating government’s legislation saved the country from years of expensive, bitter litigation by those asserting their native title. Hewson was willing to countenance such litigation or leave it to the states to handle the “problem” of native title — or both. When Howard talked the Coalition parties into their qualified embrace of Keating’s law, in 1998, he was merely conceding Keating’s realistic appreciation, in 1993, that stability of property rights required a national framework for determining native title.

Bragg’s omission of the Racial Discrimination Act from his history of Australian liberalism might be excused by saying that it was Whitlam’s law. But this only underlines the fallacy of elevating the Liberal Party as the pre-eminent bearer of liberalism. To include that legislation in the story of native title sharpens the question: which side of politics and which branch of the Australian state has more effectively carried Australian liberalism’s respect for the right — fundamentally important in a settler colonial society — not to be discriminated against on racial grounds?

In a liberal polity the judiciary and the legislature both have parts to play in securing citizens against racial discrimination. The judiciary applies international or national codes of rights to litigated cases of discrimination; the legislature passes laws that make it an offence to discriminate on racial grounds (except when the different treatment is designed to have a positive effect).

Since 2012, the debate about how to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution has made clear that Australians don’t agree about the relative importance of the judiciary and the legislature as vehicles of liberalism. “Constitutional conservatives” (a label proudly worn by Bragg and others) are wary of further empowering the judiciary to hold legislators to account: after all, the legislature is elected, and so it embodies popular sovereignty. “Rights advocates” (for want of a better label) are wary of Australian legislators’ demonstrated readiness to make laws that unfairly discriminate against minorities: the courts’ adherence to codes of fairness (in common law, in international protocols or in the Constitution) is a necessary check on legislatures’ majoritarian arrogance.

So a history of Australian liberalism shouldn’t champion one side of politics but highlight the two sides’ competitive dynamic, and it should consider the interactions among all three branches of the state: executive, judiciary and legislature. It should recognise that one of the issues that continues to animate Australian liberalism is how best to distribute, among the three branches of the state, responsibility for the definition and enforcement of rights.

The most important feature of Bragg’s liberalism is that he seeks to honour the distinct rights of Indigenous Australians in a way consistent with his constitutionally conservative wish not to empower the High Court to encumber legislators. Between 2012 and 2017, the constitutional conservatives gained political ascendancy over those who wished to write new rights into the Constitution, so Bragg is — in this sense — on the winning side. But he seems unable or unwilling to recognise the significance of that victory. Historians will one day see this debate as one of the more significant in Australian political history: the triumph of the constitutional conservatives will shape the way that Indigenous rights are mediated in our political system for the foreseeable future.

At several points in Buraadja it is clear that Bragg doesn’t wish to tell the story of constitutional conservatives’ ascendancy. He passes very quickly over episodes when the rights approach to Indigenous affairs was strongly asserted. Although Bragg admires the Liberal parliamentarian W.C. Wentworth, for example, he devotes only a sentence to his attempt, in 1966, to insert a ban on racial discrimination into the Constitution. Liberal prime minister Harold Holt and opposition leader Gough Whitlam combined to present the “constitutional conservative” argument against Wentworth’s idea, and the referendum that the major parties endorsed in 1967 placed no judicial restraint on legislative or executive actions towards Indigenous Australians.

The constitutional conservatives mobilised again in response to the 2012 report of the expert panel on Indigenous recognition. The panel recommended that the Constitution be changed in two ways that would have widened the path of High Court litigation by aggrieved Indigenous Australians. One change was to convert the “races” power — section 51(xxvi) — into a requirement that federal legislation about Indigenous Australians be beneficial; the other was to add a new section that would disallow racial discrimination (not only against Indigenous Australians).

The conservatives’ eloquent and sustained campaign — mainly in the pages of the Australian — argued that such amendments would encourage Indigenous Australians to litigate in the High Court, with the possibility that the court would overrule the legislature and/or inhibit the executive. The expert panel’s proposal would make the Constitution a bill of rights, they warned, empowering the court and diminishing parliament.

That debate took place mainly in the press, but in one singularly luminous moment, on 22 September 2014, it was joined in the House of Representatives, when Stephen Jones — the Labor member for (ironically) Whitlam — gave liberal reasons for supporting the panel’s proposals. Jones invoked a rights-based liberalism as a guide to government. To fail to use the Constitution to protect against racial discrimination would be “a denial of fundamental liberal values… which those on the conservative side of politics have long held dear.” He then listed the rights of individuals, noting that “the protection against discrimination on the basis of race” was among those not yet constitutionally protected, despite being “one of these rights that liberals have always championed.”

Jones’s second appeal to liberalism was that “no government and no parliament should have unlimited power to legislate in ways that interfere with the liberties of its citizens.” Such power must be subject to constitutional checks.

Jones’s third point concerned “the rights of the minority against the majority,” pointing out that “liberals and conservatives have always sought to guard against the tyranny of majoritarian rule.” Taking aim at the constitutional conservatives, Jones asserted that to protect those rights “by the popular vote and through the democratic process of representative government” was not sufficient. It was necessary to “constrain the federal parliament,” as the expert panel’s proposals aimed to do.

It isn’t surprising that Bragg doesn’t mention Jones’s speech, since his aim is to highlight Liberals’ liberalism. But it is surprising that he doesn’t admit that what was at stake in the constitutional recognition debate was an issue endemic to liberal government: how to reconcile popular sovereignty with minority rights. He is wrong to say that “the focus for the decade between 2007 and 2017 was on formulating symbolic constitutional recognition.” No it wasn’t — the relationship between judiciary and legislature is a substantive issue. He also refers to  2007–17 as a “fruitless decade.” No — the “fruit” was what constitutional conservatives wished: putting certain “rights” in the Constitution ceased to be a political option.

In his page and a half on the debate about the expert panel’s advocacy of constitutional rights, Bragg refers to the panel’s (and subsequent joint select committees’) proposed replacement of the races power as “some tweaks to the races power in Section 51.” Tweaks? His word choice trivialises a deeply considered proposal and several years of debate about it. Not amending section 51(xxvi) means that parliament retains the power to legislate for and against Indigenous interests.

Bragg can afford to be cavalier about the constitutional conservatives’ victory over the expert panel because of the form that victory has taken: Indigenous endorsement. The constitutional conservatives began to prevail in 2014 when Noel Pearson reached out to them. With their counsel, he proposed that Australia abandon the expert panel’s “rights” proposals and seek a referendum mandate for a new Indigenous “right” to address parliament. Three years after Pearson first offered the constitutional conservatives this olive branch, a national assembly of Indigenous Australians endorsed it in May 2017: the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

As the Uluru Statement was — in this sense — a victory for the constitutional conservative side of the debate, Bragg’s warm endorsement is no surprise. Perhaps what has been more surprising — to Bragg and many others, including myself — is the Coalition’s ongoing reluctance to commit to holding the necessary referendum. Malcolm Turnbull’s dismissal of the Uluru Statement and Scott Morrison’s caution about constitutional recognition remind us that liberal conservatism can be a combination of indolence, complacency and a fearful lack of imagination.

The return of Barnaby Joyce to the deputy prime ministership is a reminder of a fact to which Bragg pays little attention as he champions the Liberal Party’s record: in almost every episode the Liberals were acting in coalition with the Country Party (more recently the National Party). Bragg’s regretful account of the Turnbull government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement in May and October 2017 can’t avoid making reference to Joyce. The Nationals leader, two days after the release of the Uluru Statement, described the Voice as “another chamber in politics” that the Australian people would not vote for. Bragg quotes Joyce as apologising later for his “fiction.” That many liberals and conservatives found Joyce’s “shallow response” persuasive is presumably a spur to Bragg’s writing, reminding liberals and conservatives to think more deeply about what they owe Australians. •

Buraadja: The Liberal Case for National Reconciliation
By Andrew Bragg | The Kapunda Press | $34.95 | 320 pages

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Of those achievements, the last-named constitutes the sole unqualified truth. The other “truths” are so embedded in the collective memory of the believers that attempts to add nuance, let alone accuracy, are bound to be disregarded, overridden or even ridiculed. The Liberals like their history and their myths to be simple and uncluttered.

Liberals do, however, take issue with each other over one matter concerning Menzies: was “the great White Chief,” as one disciple liked to call him, a conservative or a liberal? The obvious answer — that he was one or the other at different times and in different circumstances — is of little solace to those who want to prove they are the true interpreters and successors of the party’s Messiah.

Those factional warriors might at first be bothered by this recently published book. After all, it is rarely pleasant to be told, albeit by implication, that you have missed the point. In The Forgotten Menzies Stephen Chavura and Greg Melleuish show that the “real” Menzies was a creation and a personification of a late-nineteenth-century world of “Greater Britain” that was very shaky by the 1930s and finally swept away during the 1960s. They demonstrate that twenty-first-century understandings of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” cannot, therefore, be usefully applied to Menzies’s thinking. He would have found the terms and definitions “puzzling.”

Menzies was not, as the authors emphasise, a profound philosophical thinker. His thoughts “tended to be discursive and superficial.” Nor was he primarily interested in advocating principles of liberalism. “He sought the reality of freedom, not the pursuit of a theoretical liberty.” He wanted “to govern in an effective fashion for the benefit of all Australians so that they could peacefully and freely pursue their goals.” He did not have a coherent philosophy behind this objective so much as a set of governing principles.

These principles were shaped by two long-gone nineteenth-century influences: “cultural puritanism” and “British idealism.” Menzies, the authors suggest, “may most helpfully be described as a cultural puritan who was also touched by British idealism — itself strongly informed by cultural puritanism.”

The authors describe “cultural puritanism” as “an outgrowth of the powerful connection between Protestantism and political liberty in British culture.” In essence, the cultural puritan was self-reliant, with a sturdy spirit of independence and humanitarian instincts, industrious, honest and honourable, a law-abiding Britisher who accepted responsibilities to the community.

The second influence, “British idealism,” was at its core “a faith that a new, better and more spiritual world was coming into being, a world that would reveal what was best in human nature.” Menzies encountered this faith at a time when its adherents — in Britain and Australia — were criticising the elevation of utilitarianism and materialism. According to the authors, Menzies always looked beyond the material benefits achieved by advances in science and technology to the gains made in the moral, spiritual and intellectual condition.

The chapters spent elaborating, defining and illustrating these influences require some of the puritan’s sturdiness. Imagine, for example, being a delegate to a meeting of the party’s NSW state council who has sat through the customarily tedious exchanges over proposed rule changes and a debate over yet another doomed reform package. How would you respond when a bright-eyed Young Liberal urged a rethink of the past and a new understanding of the Founder and quoted this paragraph from The Forgotten Menzies to describe his intellectual inheritance?

Cultural puritanism was characterised by a moral self-confidence borne along by the powerful cultural impact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicalism and the buoying effect of the spread of the British Empire. It may be understood as a subspecies of cultural Protestantism, the latter emphasising anti-Catholicism and Enlightenment, not to mention individualism. Cultural puritanism’s ethic was a disciplined, world-embracing sense of duty to improve society, but not at the cost of self-reliance and striving, ungirded by a vague Protestantism without the enthusiasm characterising evangelicalism.

A delegate listening to that passage could restore self-confidence by reckoning that Menzies would also have found it “puzzling.” After all, he spoke and wrote in a language and manner that mere mortals could comprehend.

Fortunately, The Forgotten Menzies moves on from statements and restatements of generalities, and from darting between quotes taken from the good and the interesting, to show Menzies’s governing principles at work in his wartime radio broadcasts and on the subject of tertiary education, which was so dear to him. Chavura and Melleuish tell us much that is new about well-known material: for example, that we should look upon Menzies’s “Forgotten People” broadcast as “the greatest expression of his heroic attempt to revive cultural puritanism in a rapidly changing Australia.”

For all its many achievements, though, The Forgotten Menzies is loaded with curiosities, circular reasoning, and unfinished and unfurnished arguments, perhaps the result of meeting a deadline or a publisher’s word limit.

Some oddities are trivial. The authors include some of their own writings in the bibliography, as well as A.W. Martin’s biography of Sir Henry Parkes, but omit Martin’s two-volume biography of Menzies.

Some oddities are important. Chavura and Melleuish identify many pivotal moments without always providing argument and evidence to justify them. The Munich agreement of 1938 has been interpreted in many ways, but it was a surprise to learn that, in retrospect, “the fate of the empire can be seen to have been sealed at Munich in 1938 when the British made a massive miscalculation in not opposing Germany because of fear of the Soviet Union.” The next two sentences read: “The war exhausted Britain. The Britain of the 1930s that Menzies idealised was no more.” It all sounds impressive, except for the huge gap between the apparent cause and the provable consequence.

The throwaway depiction of Jan Christian Smuts of South Africa as a “racist” would have been reasonable if the authors had explained their understanding of the term — and its limitations here in view of what followed after Smuts lost the prime ministership in 1948. Branding individuals in this way may be expected, rather, of those whom the authors think abused the education they received after its expansion following Menzies’s retirement in 1966.

An older generation of Liberals, perplexed or angered by minorities shouting their demands for recognition and wholesale surrender, would agree with Menzies that “duties, not rights… generated proper moral order.” They would remain unaware that it was one of Menzies’s “boys,” Sir John Crawford, who after his retirement from the public service became vice-chancellor of the ANU, where he encouraged the students when they demanded a voice and a vote in university governance. Their successors, after Crawford’s time, built on their gains by seeking to determine who shall and shall not be heard within the university environment.

Overall, Chavura and Melleuish allow the true believers to retain the truths they have always accepted while probably reinforcing the dogmatism of those who regard Menzies as more of a conservative than a liberal — thus adding strength to the Labor view of him as a fossil. Yet there is something sad and embarrassing about elements of the Liberal Party’s broad church looking for sanction from a man who fought valiantly for values derived from the great days of the British Empire, which were already being overtaken by fresh events and new ideas.

Chavura and Melleuish offer a way out: just accept that the early twenty-first century cannot reproduce the late nineteenth century.

The pity is that this book is perhaps too cerebral for a party whose members, for the most part, believe it exists solely to fight and win the next election, and whose current federal leader is both the perfect embodiment and appropriate champion of that goal. •

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Along with the untimely exit of their local member, the number one issue among voters in Upper Hunter is how to ensure that coal still has a future in the region. Or at least that’s how the major parties see it. The main contenders are in deep accord about the sanctity of coal: Labor has preselected Jeff Drayton, a former coalminer and a local CFMEU official, and the Nationals have chosen a pro-coal construction manager named David Layzell.

But the former Liberal prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, who owns a property in the electorate, has other ideas. Last week he publicly endorsed local farmer Kirsty O’Connell, who is running as an independent. Just like Turnbull, O’Connell wants a pause placed on any new coalmines in the Hunter Valley.

Turnbull’s endorsement drew a quick response from deputy NSW premier John Barilaro, a man who’s never met a lump of coal he didn’t like. Turnbull is an “absolute disgrace,” declared the National Party’s NSW leader, and his actions are “nothing short of treachery.” It’s not hard to imagine him saying less flattering things behind closed doors.

It’s possible that NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian might also be saying a few things behind closed doors. But they wouldn’t be quite as negative — in Turnbull’s view, at least. “I think Kirsty O’Connell will be a phenomenal contribution to the state parliament,” he told the ABC, “and one that — while she would never be able to say it publicly of course — Gladys Berejiklian would privately appreciate.”

Despite being Coalition partners and leading one of the most successful state governments in the country, Barilaro and Berejiklian don’t get on. They are at odds ideologically — especially over environmental policy, and particularly in relation to climate change and the protection of endangered fauna.

Last year Barilaro’s distaste for the government’s efforts to save koala habitats led to a dramatic threat to take the Nationals out of the government and onto the crossbenches. His absurd suggestion was that the party could do this without giving up its cabinet positions — a case of having two cakes, and eating both of them.

It’s important to remember that the NSW government has had only a bare majority in parliament — and it lost that yesterday when Gareth Ward moved to the crossbench after allegations of sexual violence. If O’Connell wins Upper Hunter then the Coalition’s hold on power would become even more difficult to maintain. But the premier might judge that having to negotiate with a moderate Liberal independent could have the happy side effect of making her National Party colleagues a little less powerful.

As well as Turnbull, O’Connell has acquired some other interesting admirers. The independent member for the federal seat of Warringah, Zali Steggall, who famously cut short the parliamentary career of Tony Abbott, has tweeted her support. So has the former independent member for New England, long-time National Party foe Tony Windsor. Indeed, Windsor’s former right-hand man, Graham Nuttall, is serving as an adviser to O’Connell’s campaign.

With a federal election due in the next twelve months, the Upper Hunter by-election has become an attention-grabbing overture to Australian politics’ full comic opera — one that Malcolm Turnbull is doing his best to rewrite to his own ends.

Malcolm Turnbull’s intervention in the Upper Hunter is just the latest chapter in his tumultuous post-PM career. The former Liberal leader has gone thoroughly rogue — and it’s something to behold. When he’s not denigrating Rupert Murdoch and News Corp in an unlikely double act with Kevin Rudd, the Laird of Darling Point has been writing a script you might call “Revenge and Realism.”

“Revenge” because he clearly wishes ill against many of his old Coalition colleagues, particularly the hard right of the Liberal Party and the National Party in toto, who together worked so diligently to bring him down. And “Realism” because he genuinely believes Australia is facing a reckoning when it comes to climate change.

As Turnbull has said many times, an issue that should have been a question of economics and engineering has become — with the aid of the Murdoch media — dangerously beholden to ideology and idiocy. With every day of delay, he argues, the cost of shifting to a post-carbon economy becomes higher. And he clearly sees a role for small “l” liberal independents in fixing this national delusion.

After the Australian recently published an article by political editor Dennis Shanahan based on an email interview with Turnbull, the former PM published the exchange of questions and answers in its pristine form on his website. It offers a fascinating insight into Turnbull’s thinking.

“There are currently three independents in what had been hitherto ultra-safe Liberal seats: Indi, Mayo and Warringah,” he notes at one point. “In each case they are held by small ‘l’ liberal women who share a commitment to taking effective action on climate change. In those seats, traditional Liberal voters, fed up with what the party has been presenting them, have chosen to vote for the candidates, or types of candidates, they believe the party should have presented. In all three cases unpopular Liberal members were defeated and that was a big motivator behind the independent vote… I do think there is a real prospect of more Liberal and indeed National seats falling the same way.”

A rough translation would read: get your act together on climate change Coalition MPs, or the independents will come for your seats. Turnbull also notes that once independent MPs get elected, they keep winning. In Mayo, Rebekha Sharkie has won three elections in a row, including a by-election. Cathy McGowan won Indi twice, and was then able to transfer her support to fellow independent Helen Haines, who won in 2019. “I would be surprised,” Turnbull predicts, “if Zali Steggall does not retain Warringah.”

When Scott Morrison won the “miracle election” in 2019, Turnbull was probably even more shocked than Bill Shorten. They won without me? would have been his first thought. Then he would have dwelled on the fact that they avoided punishment for their destruction of (his) sensible climate change policy. There must be another way to make them see the light.

Now he seems to believe the Coalition can only be reformed by a tribe of Liberal independents stamping on the ambitions of career politicians and forcing them to tackle climate change or risk losing their seats. But if the independent wins in Indi and Mayo and Warringah are any guide, this will only happen if strong candidates are backed by ordinary Australians who think democracy is too important to be left to the professionals.

Would support from a former PM help? Or would it hinder a proud independent by calling into question how truly independent he or she is? Being authentically independent, and advocating for a new style of politics, is what makes these candidates so attractive to voters.

Are we about to learn how much a political endorsement from Malcolm Turnbull really counts? •

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The government’s new strategy would focus on providing “temporary, proportionate and targeted” (but nonetheless substantial) fiscal support to “private sector jobs and investment,” as well as allowing the “automatic stabilisers” (tax receipts and cyclically sensitive spending) to “work freely to support the economy.” This strategy would remain in place — and the government would not embark upon the task of “budget repair” — until the unemployment rate was “comfortably below 6 per cent,” which was unlikely to be the case until 2024.

The budget projected the largest budget deficit, as a proportion of GDP, since the second world war — a decisive turnaround for a treasurer in a government that had gone to the previous election with having put the budget “back in the black” as one of its proudest boasts. But it was (as Stanley Holloway’s Alf Doolittle so memorably put it in My Fair Lady) “The Right and Proper Thing To Do.”

Yesterday, twelve days before the 2021–22 budget, Treasurer Frydenberg once again did the Right and Proper Thing when he pledged that— despite the unemployment rate (to his and everyone else’s surprise) having already fallen below 6 per cent — the government won’t commence budget repair until the unemployment rate has “a four in front of it.” In the technical language of economists, he was acknowledging that the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” is now, as Treasury and the Reserve Bank estimate, between 4.5 and 5 per cent.

Summing up, the treasurer assured his audience that the government isn’t planning “any sharp pivots towards ‘austerity,’” which means that both fiscal and monetary policy will be working in harmony towards a common goal of “full employment.”

These words are a marked contrast to government policy between 2002 and 2008, when the Reserve Bank was gradually tightening monetary policy but the Howard government (and the Rudd government in its first year in office) gave repeated rounds of personal income tax cuts and cash bonuses to pensioners and other groups.

And they also contrast markedly with what happened between 2014 and the onset of the pandemic. The Reserve Bank was, for the most part, seeking to ease monetary policy in response to what became a persistent under-shooting of its inflation target (and an unemployment rate stubbornly above 5 per cent), only for those efforts to be thwarted by the Coalition’s efforts to return the budget to surplus.

What’s important to remember is that a large amount of “budget repair” will occur over the next two years anyway, without the need for any discretionary “fiscal consolidation.” That’s partly because almost half of the deterioration in the budget’s bottom line is spending that was time-limited by design: that is, like JobKeeper, it switches off without the need for a specific decision to cut spending. And it’s partly because much of the remaining deterioration in the bottom line — which was due to a fall in revenues driven by the downturn in the economy — will be reversed as people go back to work and start spending again, and as business profits continue to recover.

The government will also get a revenue boost from the much-higher-than-expected price of iron ore (although it will probably continue to be very conservative in its assumptions about how long that will continue).

At some point, the government will probably have to make some hard decisions on either the revenue or the spending sides of the budget, or both, if it wants budget surpluses — particularly if it also decides to commit to increased spending in areas such as aged care and childcare. But there is no need for haste.

Indeed, there is a case to be made that — even when the economy has reached full employment, as it is now defined by both the Reserve Bank and Treasury — the government should stand back from repairing the budget and allow the Reserve Bank to begin rebuilding Australia’s monetary policy buffers before it starts to rebuild its own fiscal policy buffers.

Why? With interest rates effectively at their lowest (and likely to remain there until “2024 at the earliest,” according to the Reserve Bank), no capacity exists to use conventional monetary policy in response to the next economic downturn. By contrast, the government clearly does have some capacity to use fiscal policy to counter any future economic downturn. Its financial position, though not as strong as it was eighteen months ago, is stronger than it was expected to be at the time of last year’s budget, will improve further over the next two years (even without any discretionary tightening), and is in much better shape than that of most other advanced economies.

So the treasurer has again made the right call at the right time. Let’s hope he continues to do that. •

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O’Brien is intimately connected to the project, of course — it was his decision as treasurer to fund the immediate commencement of the project in 2013, despite a pending court challenge and Labor’s commitment to dump it, and his decision to issue a special letter to the contractors promising as much as half a billion dollars in compensation if the courts found the project to be invalid.

But personal vindication is not the only attraction for the Liberals. Shadow roads minister Tim Smith points to the $4 billion in federal dollars still on the table for the project that amounts, he says, to a “free road” for the state, something an O’Brien government could begin building “immediately” if elected. Indeed, he wrote in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, the Andrews government’s obstinance over the freeway “borders on pathological.”

Smith’s claims provoked the predictable responses from the Andrews government, which laughed off the project as a waste of money, and from public transport activists, who asked why, having pledged to build the project in 2014 and 2018 and lost both elections, the Liberals might see some political capital this time around. If anyone had a pathological obsession with East West Link, they implied, it must be Victoria’s Liberals.

Both criticisms are worth examining. Even if we accept the opposition’s optimistic appraisals of the project’s economic worth — and we probably shouldn’t — it’s clear that construction would not be the breeze it imagines. Since coming to power in 2014, the Andrews government has sold back many of the homes compulsorily acquired in the first run at East West Link, removed all the planning overlays and approvals that had been granted, and amended heritage protection for large inner-city parks. Building the road would require totally new approvals and acquisitions. That kind of process usually takes at least a year and a half — hardly an immediate start.

Then, in late 2019, the Andrews government nominated a section of Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway for heritage status. The opposition saw this as East West monkey-wrenching, and with some justification: the section nominated is the bit that would require major surgery to connect to an East West tunnel.

None of this makes the building of (some kind of) East West Link impossible, but the booby traps and uncertainties would undoubtedly drive up the time and cost involved. The contracting market is likely to cost in these problems, as well as the broader political risk of the project’s being overturned again.

Even if the market has not tarred the whole state with a “sovereign risk” label — as O’Brien claimed it would back when he was state treasurer warning voters off Labor and its plans to cancel the project— East-West Link would undoubtedly have one attached to it. Recall that even the first time around, in 2014, O’Brien needed to offer the private sector half a billion free dollars just to get the contractors to sign on — and that was before any governments had invalidated any contracts. A second attempt could come with truly eye-watering costs — blowing out even the most optimistic cost–benefit equations.

With that said, I’m not so sure actually building this project matters deeply to the Victorian Liberals. Having seen the debate on East West Link evolve over many years, I’m not convinced the opposition is promising to build East West simply because it believes passionately in its merits, or that the Liberals are so persuaded of its overwhelming utility that they cannot bring themselves to talk about any other projects.

East West Link is not a normal election boondoggle — it is infused with political venom, with outrage and resentment and suspicion of political enemies. It has become a kind of political totem, a symbol caught up in the culture war. A promise to build East West Link isn’t so much a serious public policy proposal but rather a pledge to hoist clan colours over the rivals’ battlements. It is a rallying call — and I’d suggest it is one pitched primarily at a Liberal Party audience.

Lord knows, the state opposition could use a little rallying. Victoria’s Liberals have been enduring a long and gruelling bout of civil strife — something I have written about on these pages before. It is the kind of thing exacerbated by lousy electoral prospects. Polling is infrequent at the state level, but Ipsos put Daniel Andrews’s approval rating at a net positive nineteen points in October last year, when Melbourne’s intense stage four lockdown was in force. The same poll had Michael O’Brien at minus twenty-four approval, and put Andrews thirty-five points ahead as preferred premier.

A month later, perhaps owing to elation at the restrictions ending, Roy Morgan had Victorian Labor with 58.5 per cent of the state’s two-party-preferred vote — better even than the 2018 “Danslide” election, and an indication that things could get worse yet for the state’s Liberals.

A mortifying example of such a fate was soon offered up by Western Australia: there, the state’s Liberal opposition was all but obliterated by Mark McGowan’s Labor government — leaving it with just two seats and the loss of official opposition status. It is little wonder that, two days after the WA election, a leadership spill was attempted in the Victorian Liberal Party — though one that didn’t quite come off.

Hence the chant of East! West! Link! It helps the state’s Liberals focus on Labor instead of themselves. While many Victorians will hear the pledge and ask if we are not, perhaps, past this issue, the intended audience will see the chant as synonymous with “wanton Labor waste” and the notion that Daniel Andrews is somehow captive to the inner-city “cultural left.” East West Link is a rallying cry, a morale booster; it is a skin to pull tight across a war drum — worn, but still making music for the troops who need to hear it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the Liberals wouldn’t try to build the thing if they somehow plucked the rabbit out of the hat and returned to government sometime soon. Plenty of massive, expensive, disruptive, ineffective, even idiotic infrastructure projects get built mainly for their symbolic value. Many projects are built not as a means to an end — getting people in and out of the city efficiently; power to homes; clean water to taps; homes connected to fast internet — but rather as political shrines, built for the statements they make, the values they embody, the memories they honour or the causes they glorify.

But I wonder if a freshly elected O’Brien government would be willing to expend so much financial and political capital on such a project, simply to shove it up inner-city lefties, build a shrine to its abhorrence of Daniel Andrews’s alleged recklessness, and rehabilitate the one-term Baillieu–Napthine government that commissioned the thing in the first place. I would not be totally surprised if, notwithstanding the beating of the East West drum, that government discovers other pressing priorities. That, or it will be built as a tomb in which to bury a one-term O’Brien government. •

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The story surprised this reader because I had assumed Morrison didn’t have strong feelings about anything much in public life apart from his own advancement. In the shark pool of self-interest that is Australian politics, he has always seemed even more flexible than most. Not since Brendan Nelson — another MP initially seen as suspiciously left-wing who transformed himself into a hero of the right — has a Liberal leader so deftly managed the party-room conservatives.

But like Nelson’s, Morrison’s efforts at wooing the public were less spectacular. For years as shadow minister and then minister, he tried to thrust that daggy dad, Sharks-loving persona into television interviews, but it never pushed him beyond single digits as preferred Liberal leader. When he got the top job anyway, his immediate reaction was to double down on the corniness.

He makes a mean curry, friendly journalists confided; and did we mention he loves the Cronulla Sharks? Endless car trip analogies. It went down a treat with much of the political class, with their clunky, clichéd ideas about what Australians crave in their leaders, but voters rolled their eyes. A quip about Julian Assange — “plenty of mates who’ve asked me if they can be my special envoy to sort the issue out with Pamela Anderson” — was a particular low point.

Luckily for the government, he got his act together for the 2019 campaign — disciplined, scripted, heavy on financial security, light on ideology. Crucially, he and his campaign went hard on the opposition’s ambitious economic policies.

Since then, though, the nadirs have kept coming. “Jenny and I spoke last night…” thoroughly deserved all the bad reviews; it was skin-crawlingly inappropriate. The chickens of last year’s extraordinary spray against Australia Post chief executive Christine Holgate — helped along by journalists passing on sources’ supposed accounts of his fury on finding out about those watches — and by Labor, which had made the initial fuss about the watches and had little choice but to claim her departure as a “scalp,” are well and truly coming home to roost.

Would he have been so aggressive towards a male Australia Post CEO? It’s difficult to imagine.

There’s a lot of excitement among left-wing types that the “women” stuff will prove the end of Morrison. Some of it borders on desperation: surely voters will finally see through him. It’s premised on the assumption that until now he was unbeatable, the default perception after a clear election win: this person can keep going forever. He was never that great. And electoral gravity gets most of them in the end.

Governments are rarely brought down by “scandals” or “events.” Instead, they tend to ebb out of office. The opinion polls start showing they’re headed for defeat, “reasons” develop, goings-on are interpreted to suit those facts.

And until the arrival of Covid-19, given the poor economic conditions and its longevity in office, the next election was always going to be a challenge for the Coalition government. Covid has been good for incumbents, as we’ve seen in four state and territory elections, and another across the ditch.

Elections aren’t about the past, a pat on the back for a job well done. They’re about the future, anticipated through the feelings of the present. If the government can somehow manage to hold a poll before the Covid crisis is over, without suffering too much from voter cynicism about the obvious opportunism — Tasmania, where a Liberal government is going earlier than it needs to, might provide some clues — it would probably win, despite the obvious vaccine rollout problems.

But if the election is held next year, and the virus is mostly behind us, then the contest will be like most of them, largely about economics and security, the hip-pocket nerve — and the inclination, after nine years, to let the other side have a go. The question will be, as always: is the other side safe?

In February Labor announced an ambitious industrial relations policy, with the gig economy given a high profile. That’s a big target to take to an election. And just to be clear, that’s not a good thing. •

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With no ready-made NSW Liberal to replace or succeed Morrison, perhaps the federal leadership will return to the Victorians when the next vacancy occurs. Josh Frydenberg is the obvious candidate and at the moment he isn’t putting a foot wrong. The prime minister, meanwhile, is having difficulty putting one right.

Do the Victorian Liberals deserve the leadership? After all, their recent record in state politics is woeful. This month’s failed and pointless leadership challenge highlighted the diminished state of the party room after the electoral drubbing of 2018. No one within the Victorian organisation appears to be in charge. The factions — which don’t officially exist — fight so hard over preselections and positions in the organisation that Labor is having an untroubled run through the Covid-19 crisis, implanting an agenda that would have scared yesterday’s Liberals into unity. Meanwhile, the deep wounds associated with personalities who ought to have had their day — namely two-time divisional president Michael Kroger and former premier Jeff Kennett — continue to linger.

Federally, the story is happier. The Victorian and NSW Liberals contributed similar percentages of seats in their respective states to the 2019 federal election result.

But does any of this really matter?

At every stage of its history, the Liberal Party has struggled with the internal problems that emerged in the mid to late 1940s. Instead of parroting myths about its origins and genuflecting before the Menzies shrine, it might profit from deploying a few officials to read the party’s records to find out what actually happened then. They might be surprised to learn three things about the Liberals’ more remote past.

First, Menzies was not the founder of the modern Liberal Party; no one qualifies for the definite article. True, the party might not have been formed as it did if he had returned to legal practice. But he played no role in forming the South Australian division, which was already in existence as the Liberal and Country League. The Queenslanders made it clear that he was unwelcome in their state. Bill Spooner did more than Menzies in setting up the NSW division in 1945, and Menzies was asked to stay away from the 1947 state election. After his failed first prime ministership, many Liberals across the country believed that “you can’t win with Menzies.”

Second, and more importantly, the key party problems the Liberals tried to solve in the postwar years remain unresolved seventy-six years later. The same issues keep cropping up: the relationships between the organisation and the state and federal parliamentary parties, between the federal and state organisations, between the organisations and the branches, between the Liberal Party and business, and between the Liberal Party and the Country/National Country/National Party. Anyone reading the party’s papers on these subjects or the continuing debates over the purpose and methods of preselecting candidates might conclude that there are no permanent solutions for any of them.

Third, it is remarkable how the Liberal Party spends little time reviewing its successes yet a great deal of time on the losses, much of it producing the same or similar explanations for every electoral defeat.

Take for example the loss of the winnable 1987 federal election. The “Joh for Canberra” campaign was a one-off disaster, but what other explanations did the official review offer? Answer, the usual suspects: advertising, finance, the federal secretariat, the organisational structure, the lack of consultation between the federal parliamentary party and the organisation, candidate selection, and relations with the Country/National Country/National Party. That list provides a good starting point to explain the next electoral failure, and much of it could be written before the event.

How then does the party explain success?

Sir Henry Bolte, the long-term Victorian premier (1955–72), loved to boast that Victoria was “the jewel in the Liberal crown,” just as he liked to remark after another of his state victories that the result showed the “sagacity” of the Victorian people. He rarely dwelt on two of the critical factors that underlay his success: the strength of the conservative Democratic Labor Party in Victoria, with its disciplined allocation of preferences; and the left’s control of the Victorian Labor Party, committing it to maintain ideological purity seemingly at the expense of electoral success.

Liberals who know their own history would be aware that the Bolte and Menzies years of supremacy were those of good luck as well as of good management. The cold war, the Labor split and the long postwar economic boom delivered the right circumstances for a prolonged non-Labor hegemony. This reality check makes it easier to explain why Labor held office in New South Wales without much difficulty for all the postwar years until 1965.

Liberal Party officials in the 1950s to the 1970s were not misled by the hyperbole of the politicians. They also knew that factional and personal wars of one kind or another had been endemic since the party was formed in 1945.

The destructive personality clashes are riveting. Unfortunately, one of them is not down on paper. It concerns two strong men in the 1950s organisation who knew how to bring Menzies to order. Both bore the same surname, Anderson. William (“Bill” to his friends) Anderson was the party’s Victorian president and later federal president. John (better known as “Bill”) Anderson was the Victorian state president.

Anderson the federal president, a Shell company director, could walk into Menzies’s office any time he chose and would periodically tell the “Great White Chief” what he should be doing or what he was not doing well. The other Anderson, a former second world war commando, told Menzies at the time of the 1954 election that if he (Menzies) refused to go to the Ford motor works in Geelong to campaign for the local member, Hubert Opperman, then he (Anderson) would pull the entire state organisation out of the election. A disgruntled Menzies, expecting to be harangued and abused in Geelong and wanting a quiet Saturday in the Windsor Hotel, finally agreed. Cheered after one of his best electoral performances, he turned to Anderson and mischievously remarked, “It was a good idea of mine to come here.”

The Andersons had just one problem: they could provide the kind of leadership notably missing from the present Victorian organisation, but they spoke of each other in terms the less-than-friendly Kroger and Kennett would have recognised.

One party official in the 1970s spoke more than a half truth when he said that three types of people joined the Liberal Party: the mad, the ambitious and the lonely. In later years, more of the lonely obtained comfort by staying home to watch television. The ambitious could prove difficult if insufficient positions or parliamentary seats existed to accommodate them. The mad — that is, the ideologically charged rather than the clinically disturbed — constituted the main problem: they had to be calmed down, outvoted, diverted or eased out.

Over the past seventy-six years a number of the mad and the ambitious, along with some newcomers and some decent and concerned Liberals — possibly with a business or legal background — would come together every three or five years to reform the Liberal Party and solve its unsolvable problems. A committee would be formed, a review conducted, a report prepared, and a recommendation taken to state council. Leaving aside the probability that the proposal involved an exercise in common sense — and was therefore likely to be rejected by state council or fail because of a rule requiring more than a simple majority — the striking thing about these processes was that they so often began with the assumption that a new idea was being contemplated. Even a quick appraisal of internal arguments in the 1940s and 1950s will show that almost every subsequent idea for reform was first raised back then.

So, the party that does not know its own history resolutely repeats it.

Reading the Liberal Party’s files might depress unwary party officials. Yet it should not. Federally, the Liberal Party has been in government for fifty years since its formation. All the failures of reform, all the dire predictions, didn’t get in the way of election victories. To the annoyance of those driven by what Neville Wran called “the vision thing,” the Liberal Party in practice rarely thinks beyond the next election. It does, however, expect and require the leader to win it.

If the past has anything to offer it is that while the relentless search for solutions to recurring problems will continue to be unsuccessful, it need not prevent the federal parliamentary leader from doing his (no “her” is presently in sight) job of winning the next election. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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That assessment, like that first quip to an overly credulous TV interviewer, is sure to raise eyebrows. But Williams takes it seriously. He believes that historians have typically taken a “myopic” view of the man who occupied the Lodge from 1968 to 1971. They have described his leadership skills as poor, ranked him as a below-average prime minister, and apportioned him overwhelming blame for the results of the 1969 election, at which the Coalition government, though winning another term, suffered a 7 per cent swing and the loss of sixteen seats.

In this biographical study — one of a series commissioned to rectify a lack of knowledge of leading figures from Australian history — Williams tries to correct the record while explaining why he still concurs that Gorton was a below-average prime minister.

There’s a paradox here that echoes the biographical subject (“the most paradoxical individual to hold Australia’s highest public office”) and this series (“scholarly rather than academic”). What emerges, however, and is valiantly argued, is that Gorton was not simply a placeholder between Menzies and Whitlam, as so many imagine, but rather an active and potentially transformative prime minister — a man who could have been great but who fell far short largely because of his own indulgence and amusement.

Born in Melbourne, or perhaps Wellington, in 1911, Gorton was the illegitimate son of a bigamist orchardist and a Catholic barmaid whose surname was Sinn. His upbringing was materially comfortable but emotionally deprived. When his mother died of tuberculosis, he was sent into the care of his father’s first wife, who also cared for Gorton’s elder sister. The nine-year-old had not known of the existence of either, yet recalled barely shrugging at the news.

An establishment education at Sydney Grammar and then Geelong Grammar was followed by a stint at Oxford, where he gained a pilot’s licence, a blue in rowing, and a wife, in the person of Bettina Brown. Vague hopes of becoming a journalist dissipated when his father died and Gorton inherited his citrus orchard at Kangaroo Lake in northern Victoria.

Like many of his generation, Gorton came of age during the second world war. As an RAAF pilot, he crashed his plane four times over four years, the second time most seriously, transforming his smooth good looks into a crumpled visage. Explaining his later tendency to speak with his head down, Gorton said that he didn’t think anyone else wore as much of their backside on their face. A career in local government after the war was cut short by election to the Senate in 1949.

Like many of the “forty-niners,” Gorton went into politics believing that it was possible to build a postwar world “in which meanness and poverty, terrorism and hate, will have no part.” He was convinced of his ability to build that world. Asked what he thought of his colleagues, he remarked, “Not much. I’m the best of them.” Notwithstanding that belief, he spent nine years on the backbench, eventually holding his first ministry — the navy, typically a training ground for new ministers — from 1958 to 1963. He later claimed that he had “built the modern navy” in that time.

More significant was his appointment to what became the education portfolio at a time when the federal government was increasingly active in the area. But he didn’t make it into cabinet until after Robert Menzies had retired in 1966, and was not a part of the government leadership group until October 1967, when prime minister Harold Holt decided the Senate needed a firmer hand and had Gorton appointed leader of the government in the Senate.

The timing was impeccable, and so was Gorton’s judgement. Perceiving a growing scandal around the misuse of government VIP aircraft, he reacted with a shrewd and casual insouciance by tabling — with a shrug — flight records whose existence the government had hitherto furiously denied. The favourable atmosphere this created allowed him to vault over more experienced colleagues in the leadership ballot that followed Holt’s death in December 1967.

It was a time of considerable political difficulty for the Liberals and their Coalition partner, the Country Party. Labor had an articulate and appealing leader in Gough Whitlam; the Coalition was beset by divisions and animosities; public support for Australia’s military commitment in Vietnam was waning; and a generation of critical journalists had arrived in the Canberra press gallery.

In Williams’s reckoning, Gorton could have risen to meet these challenges, not least because his earthy nationalism, liberalism and rugged appearance struck a chord with the public and suggested a new direction for a two-decades-old government. “We had reached a stage where we were on top of a mountain, and we had to decide whether we stayed up there or go out in various directions,” Gorton later told Williams. As prime minister, these directions were given the catch-all term of “Gortonism,” a highly individual set of preferences including centralism over federalism, prime ministerial autonomy over cabinet government, and greater spending on social welfare.

The problem was that each of these preferences infuriated members of Gorton’s party. Liberal state premiers, conscious of the federal government’s continued growth, protested at Gorton’s moves to extend Commonwealth sovereignty over the continental shelf. Cabinet colleagues were driven to near-madness by Gorton’s unilateralism, evident in his protecting MLC Life Insurance from foreign takeover and in negotiations over oil discoveries in the Bass Strait. “Get this into your head,” Country Party leader John McEwen told Gorton while explaining that consultation was a vital part of the Coalition agreement. And Gorton’s insistence on increased social spending made treasurer Billy McMahon irate to the point that he all but disowned the 1969–70 budget.

One effect of that increase was a 5 per cent cut in defence spending, which raised the hackles of the anti-communist hardliners in the Democratic Labor Party. Given that they had threatened to withhold preferences from the government in 1968, it is hard to know why Gorton was happy to antagonise them again in 1969. But he compounded the offence by signing off on a speech by external affairs minister Gordon Freeth in which Australians were told not to panic if the Soviet Union extended its influence into the Indian Ocean. The DLP made good on its threat and withheld preferences when the election was called for 25 October 1969, forcing Gorton to campaign on an unwieldy program of increased social spending and greater national security.

Gorton indulged himself during that campaign by allowing rumours to proliferate about McMahon’s role in a re-elected government. This distraction, which fed stories of disunity and division that could have been stopped with a single denial, astounded observers. “I have never experienced such a hopeless Liberal–Country composite government campaign,” wrote former Country Party leader Artie Fadden.

Williams tries to defend Gorton from what followed, noting that the government’s support at the 1969 election was equal to its performance in 1967, when the VIP scandal was reaching its apogee and itchy government members were fretting about Holt. This, says Williams, “clearly undermines any claim of Gorton as sole or principal architect of the Coalition’s near-defeat.” The 1969 result certainly lends weight to the argument that the government’s fortunes were in long-term decline, but it also shows just how valuable an opportunity Gorton squandered with his insistence on behaving (in his own words) “precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave.” By the time of the election, this willfulness had earned him the disapproval of censorious opponents. Gorton was unrepentant: “I like a party where I can sing and dance and yarn. Yes, I even like talking to women! How else can I keep in touch with what people are thinking and saying?… Do they want me to live in an ivory tower and meet only diplomats and politicians? Well, damn it, I’m not going to.”

The results of the election put paid to that kind of freedom. The loss of so many seats — including Freeth’s — saw Gorton’s leadership challenged by McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn. Gorton survived, but in Williams’s account his eventual demise in March 1971 was now almost inevitable. So, too, in Williams’s telling, was the demise of the government, which followed twenty-one months later.

Perceptions that the period between Menzies and Whitlam was a shapeless interregnum have been commonplace for years. One valuable feature of this book is Williams’s effort to show otherwise by setting out the policies and actions that, he argues, make Gorton a “bridge” between the conservatism of the Menzies years and the progressive liberalism of the Whitlam government. Whether it was his nationalism, his enthusiasm for the National Film and Television Training School, or his unapologetic moves to extend the power of the Commonwealth, his record shows an ageing and divided government responding to the hopes and demands of an emerging generation.

While Williams is remiss not to include the McMahon government in that bridge, given its attempts to chart a new way forward, his book draws attention to a vital period in Australia’s history and a significant figure who was vastly more complex than a description of his height and weight, or even his claim to be best prime minister, might suggest. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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There was nothing too remarkable about the actual words. Plenty of others were saying the same — though not too many Liberals and fewer prominent Liberals, particularly members of the Morrison government. The following month Kean revealed that senior Liberals, including members of federal cabinet, were privately urging stronger action on climate change, and advised the federal government to drop its reliance on emission credits held over from the Kyoto agreement to meet its 2030 emissions target. That was too much for Scott Morrison.

“Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he declared. “He doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet and most of federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was.”

Aimed at a fellow Liberal, it was quite a put-down. It was also a bit of a stretch, considering that Kean is leader of the Liberals’ moderate, or small “l,” faction in New South Wales, fancies himself as a future state premier and misses few opportunities for publicity. Any federal MPs who hadn’t heard of him would have been way behind with their homework.

As for federal cabinet, bound by solidarity and secrecy, it is a sure bet that ministers are talking much more frankly to Kean than they are in public, and those most likely to be doing so are fellow moderates. Yes, they do exist in federal cabinet, including near the top of the tree — their ranks include Simon Birmingham and Marise Payne — even if their voices are muted and their influence on policy limited. This has been the lot of moderate Liberals ever since John Howard first became opposition leader in 1985.

Prominent moderate Peter Baume, a minister in the Fraser government, resigned from the Liberal Party in 1996 when Howard became prime minister because he didn’t want to be associated with a conservative government. Others, like Ian Macphee, lost preselection to conservatives. Still others, like Robert Hill, environment and defence minister in the Howard government, and Christopher Pyne, a minister in every Coalition government from Howard until 2019, tried to keep the moderate flag flying by working within the government. And then there was Philip Ruddock, a critic of Howard’s stance on immigration in opposition who, as immigration minister, implemented some of the harshest policies Australia has seen towards refugees.

Much of the recent public debate about the Liberals and Nationals has focused on right-wing MPs who typically oppose marriage equality and other social reforms, are climate change sceptics, if not deniers, and may doubt that Covid-19 is as serious as most people think. They have been particularly adept at leveraging their small numbers to hold the government hostage, with climate change the outstanding example. But moderates are a larger group, and some Liberals who wouldn’t use that label are also increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress on urgent issues confronting the government, including climate change.

Christopher Pyne (centre) — shown here in 2019 with fellow Liberal moderates Marise Payne and Simon Birmingham — has been active in the pushback against the party’s right. Dean Lewins/AAP Image

They might not be as vocal as the Craig Kellys and Barnaby Joyces, but they are showing signs of growing assertiveness. One indication is the growing support for two Liberal-aligned organisations applying pressure from outside — the Blueprint Institute and the Coalition for Conservation.

Blueprint’s chief executive and co-founder, Harry Guinness, was a policy and political adviser to Julie Bishop when she was foreign minister and deputy Liberal leader. His responsibilities included foreign aid, climate change and environmental sustainability.

Last summer’s bushfires were the catalyst for Guinness — self-described as “definitely philosophically a small ‘l’ Liberal” — and colleagues to set up Blueprint as a pro-market think tank. “With the bushfires there was a genuine sense that the time had come, after a decade of messing around with climate policy and not doing justice to what is really the biggest economic challenge of this generation and the next generation,” he tells me. “It is clear there needed to be more research and a more compelling story coming from the right of politics, getting beyond the energy reliability and the affordability issues.”

Guinness’s first employee was Daniel D’Hotman, a Rhodes scholar he met at Oxford University, where Guinness obtained a master’s degree in international development. The contrasts between Britain, which has a strong bipartisan policy on climate change, and Australia struck them both. “I was inspired by the UK,” says Guinness. “It’s pretty remarkable what has been achieved. Or maybe it’s remarkable what has happened here. If you think of the history of conservatism and the philosophy it has, it makes sense for a conservative party to be stewards of the environment and protecting the economy and thinking ahead.”

A recent Blueprint report argues that net zero emissions are inevitable by 2050 or even earlier, and the longer we delay the costlier it will be. As a first step, it says, we should commit to halving emissions from coal-fired electricity this decade.

Apart from climate change, Blueprint is conducting research and publishing papers on early learning, childcare, unemployment insurance and other social policy issues, and on economic policies including tax reform. Guinness says it has a budget of less than $1 million a year from donors who are anonymous “at this stage” but is diversifying to corporate sponsorships and membership contributions that will be made public.

Guinness has attracted a stellar cast to serve on Blueprint’s Strategic Council, including two of the Liberal Party’s most senior moderates, Christopher Pyne and Robert Hill. Another member is Bruce Baird, a senior minister in the NSW Greiner government who, having moved to federal parliament, was kept on the backbench by Howard. Two other former state ministers from the sensible side of the NSW Nationals, Wendy Machin and Adrian Piccoli, have also been enlisted.

Even more heavyweight is the team of “ambassadors” — Malcolm Turnbull, Lucy Turnbull, Robert Hill, Nick Greiner and Philip Ruddock — assembled by the Coalition for Conservation. Compared with Blueprint, it takes a more direct advocacy role, and also organises events, including the webinar last year that brought together Turnbull and former British prime minister David Cameron to discuss “the UK Conservative leadership on climate.”

The Coalition for Conservation’s chair is Cristina Talacko, whose many other roles include director of the Export Council of Australia, vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party’s Women’s Council, and secretary of the state party’s environment and energy policy branch. She tells me that C4C, as she refers to her organisation, started five years ago under the name Conservatives for Conservation. About two years ago, it changed names because “calling ourselves conservatives was putting off a lot of the moderates or middle group.” Combined with the growing momentum of the climate change debate, the decision seems to have worked: C4C has grown from about 500 signed-up supporters two years ago to 2000 last year, with numbers now standing at somewhere around 5000.

“We couldn’t talk about climate change in the very early days: it was seen as a very ‘left’ or costly thing to discuss for Liberals,” says Talacko. “The feeling was that you have to choose between the economy and the environment. We changed that perspective because we are showing that the only way to grow is to grow sustainably.”

As for the vocal group in the government that opposes action to reduce emissions, she says that “you can count them on your fingers and that is a good thing.” She adds that her organisation has helped to create “more of a safe space” for the voices of the centre in the party to be heard. C4C’s latest webinar brings together Liberal backbenchers Katie Allen and Trent Zimmerman with advocates for electric vehicles.

Talacko has also helped lend a sense of urgency to the debate. “The Liberal Party has always been known as the party of business, and its progressive leaders are seeing these opportunities and are ready to capitalise on them. No Liberal will want to be responsible for preventing Australia from seizing the next big economic opportunity.”

Recently she has advocated setting a net zero target “while it is still a choice, not an ultimatum,” citing moves in Europe and the United States to impose carbon levies on international trade from countries that are dragging their heels on climate change policy. While Scott Morrison is inching towards adopting a target, he is still focusing on the costs of doing so, rather than the opportunities it creates. “Fossil fuel reliant jobs are few and at risk, while jobs in renewables are growing at a higher rate,” says Talacko.

One sure sign that the debate is shifting is a recent publication by the Menzies Research Centre, the Liberal Party’s official think tank. Its latest policy paper includes a lengthy introduction from executive director Nick Cater extolling the substantial contribution the farming sector can make to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “An increase in the organic carbon content of soils of just 0.5 per cent, for example, would have the same effect as closing Australia’s coal-fired power stations for three years,” he writes. (Others argue that the potential is much greater and that most or all of Australia’s total emissions could be offset by increasing soil carbon.)

Cater certainly isn’t the first to promote the benefits of sequestering carbon in the soil. But it isn’t the kind of advocacy you’d expect to hear from him. A former editor of the Weekend Australian, he continues to write a weekly column for the daily Australian in which he has revealed himself to be anything but a small “l” Liberal, let alone a climate change activist. He has railed against the “Armageddon industry,” and in 2017 wrote that “time has helped illuminate the dewy-eyed naivety of the climate change policy Rudd took to the 2007 election.” That policy was to sign the Kyoto accord, which Howard had refused to do, and to put a price on carbon, which happened to be Howard’s policy at that election, as well as Labor’s, although Cater forgot to mention that.

Cater also promoted the favourite far-right conspiracy of the time: “The science of global warming offered the intellectuals another chance to organise the world as they wanted it to be, to take charge of human affairs and to bypass the irksome process of democracy… It was an opportunity to settle old scores by refighting the lost battle of the Cold War: the fight against free markets.” Strange then that Rudd’s, and Howard’s, plan to adopt an emissions trading scheme was based squarely on free-market economics.

If even Nick Cater has begun  barracking for action on climate change, then you could say the debate really has moved on. What’s next — the Nationals taking up the cause? Actually, they already have. Not Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan, of course, who are campaigning against a net zero target because “if the Nationals supported net zero emissions we would cease to be a party that could credibly represent farmers.” Nor the deputy prime minister and Nationals’ leader Michael McCormack, who has to publicly support his government but thinks we should exempt agriculture if we adopt a target.

Another National, NSW agriculture minister Adam Marshall, thinks that idea isn’t so flash. “Ring fencing farmers from a net zero carbon target is nothing but political point-scoring based on the needs of those who think in timelines that are based on their political needs, not the future of agriculture.” He wonders how farmers can help shape policy and take advantage of the opportunities it opens up if they are excluded from the target. “What I want is for farmers to be paid for the valuable environmental benefits they bring to the table for New South Wales, for biodiversity, carbon, renewables, sustainable agriculture and so many other untapped potential income streams. By cutting them out you’re cutting them off.”

Farmer bodies long ago left the federal Nationals in their wake. The National Farmers’ Federation has a target of net zero emissions by 2050. Meat and Livestock Australia and the grain industry are aiming for net zero by 2030, and the pork industry by 2025. The National Party used to be the farmer’s friend but these days you have to wonder: carving out industries may be in the interests of the coal and other fossil fuel interests that donate generously to the Nationals, but it is not in the interests of farmers.

With net zero emissions targets promised by most developed countries and every Australian state government, Liberal and Labor, with public opinion in favour of stronger action, with US president Joe Biden foreshadowing a comprehensive set of policies to tackle climate change and British prime minister Boris Johnson announcing a green industrial revolution, how long can the Morrison government hold back the tide?

One of the last occasions the moderates took a significant public stand was in 2006 when three backbenchers, Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan, crossed the floor of the House of Representatives to vote against the offshore processing of asylum seekers. When Judith Troeth threatened to do the same in the Senate, Howard withdrew the legislation rather than face defeat. It turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for the moderates, with the Gillard government enacting the same policy six years later.

Since then the moderates have been on the back foot. But the stirrings in the ranks suggest that reports of their death have been exaggerated. The big test will be the future course of national climate policy. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Not in the sense that luck kept falling his way, but that he enjoyed one massive chunk of it: becoming opposition leader the year before an election that was almost impossible to lose. And this meant he happened to form government just as the international economy was hitting its stride for the longest period of economic growth since the postwar boom.

Yes, you also make your own luck. Howard was disciplined, intelligent and hard-working. But ask overseas contemporaries like Jean Chrétien (Canada 1993–2003), Tony Blair (Britain 1997–2007) and Helen Clark (New Zealand 1999–2008) what they reckon about governing during that astonishing time: facing oppositions burdened by having presided over the early 1990s recession; able to brag about low inflation, low unemployment and low interest rates (at least by 1970s–90s standards); blessed with house prices blowing the roof off and budgets returning to surplus. A swathe of Australian Labor premiers and chief ministers also jumped on board. The mining boom was but icing on an already sumptuous cake.

And yet, while most of the leaders above chalked up record-sized election victories, the Howard government’s margins were underwhelming.

Howard led what was and remains the biggest-taxing government in Australian history. That’s not a criticism; it was a function of all the dough sloshing around. Federal tax receipts peaked at 24.3 per cent of GDP in 2004–05 and 2005–06, and averaged 23.4 per cent across his eleven and a half years. His successors could only dream of such largesse. (The 2010–11 trough of 19.9 per cent was the lowest since the 1970s.) If 24.3 per cent of GDP had flowed into the Rudd and Gillard governments’ coffers, all their budgets would have been in surplus. Even 23.4 per cent would have produced surpluses for most of them, and that’s without taking into account the increased spending that economic slowdowns inevitably produce.

Actually, Howard enjoyed one other bit of excellent luck. How good was losing office in November 2007, eight months before the bottom fell out of the world economy? His splendid record remained in place; he dines out on it to this day.

Howard’s reign can be neatly sliced in two. The first half, 1996 to 2001, was mostly characterised by a curious torpor, electoral disappointment and low-to-mediocre approval ratings. Just eighteen months in, with the Labor opposition in front in opinion polls, finance writer Max Walsh punted in the Sydney Morning Herald that “the odds are against John Howard leading the government to the next election.” Press gallery doyens like the Australian’s Paul Kelly lamented the lack of leadership. Howard clung on against a backdrop of chatter about a switch to Peter Costello.

But the 2001 election win — post-Tampa, post–September 11 — transformed all that. Having appeared to be heading for defeat (though the polls were already tracking upwards before the Norwegian ship entered our waters), Howard’s approval ratings shot up and remained healthy right to the end. After the 2001 victory, commentators, friends and foes alike, fell at his feet, apologising for ever doubting him. Have a squiz at the late Alan Ramsey’s gushing correspondence.

Having come back from the dead, he now stood for something all right: political success. And that which was seen as his Achilles heel, an obvious discomfort with modern, multicultural Australia, was now seen as the very secret of that success. After asylum seekers were falsely accused of throwing their children off a boat in October 2001, he was finally in his element, declaring, “I don’t want people of that type coming into this country.” (Yes, the whole boat was judged on the alleged actions of a few.) Out and proud, then vindicated by the election result, he never looked back. In those pre-Trump days, he was an outlier among Western leaders in his willingness to indulge in such inflammatory language. (Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi was another.)

Our national storytellers, in academia and the fourth estate, competed to construct the most glorious portrait of this man with the astonishing common touch, who held the electorate in the palm of his hand. Forests were sacrificed for the “Howard’s battlers” fiction. Best of all, perhaps, he was now a “conviction politician!”

The previous Liberal prime minister, the toffy Malcolm Fraser (1975–1983), enjoyed bigger election wins than Howard, including in Sydney’s fabled western suburbs, but you know what they say about facts and good stories. Howard’s success was deemed unprecedented, and its proffered causes became more and more fantastic. (Some examples of superlative overload can be found in the first paragraph here.)

But the assumption implicit in so much commentary — that his longevity rested not on a booming world economy but on what is euphemistically called “values” — is a slander on Australian voters.

Was his a good government? Answering that is hopelessly subjective. He had a calm temperament and ran a good cabinet. Did it do good things? Sure, why not? I just can’t think of any big ones right now, other than the GST, and neither can you. That tax policy, notable more for its status as an emblem of his “conviction” than its earth-shattering importance, came into operation in 2000. What did he do for the next seven years? Budget surpluses! Winning culture wars, flaying Labor, bestriding the political landscape!

Still, Australia came through the global financial crisis pretty well, as we came through the 1997 Asian financial meltdown. Credit to previous governments in both cases.

So what is Howard’s legacy, apart from his own ludicrously overblown political reputation?

During his prime ministership he would frequently opine, particularly during election campaigns, that one of his proudest achievements was that Australians now felt freer to discuss uncomfortable topics — by which, of course, he meant matters of race. (Since leaving office, this point has generally been absent from his retrospective boasting.)

If a politician’s legacy consists of something that would probably not have occurred under another prime minister of either party, then this is where Howard’s lies. He did make a long-term difference: to the behaviour of the political class, to the conduct of the Coalition and Labor, and to the way the media covers politics and wider current affairs.

Was this not why he won elections? Did he not speak for ordinary Australians? Weren’t those who objected simply expressing sour grapes?

Sol Trujillo, of Mexican heritage but born in America, was Telstra boss from 2005 to 2009. His tenure was marked in the media by references to “amigos,” “tortillas” and “enchiladas,” and he later told the BBC that racism in Australia “was evident in a lot of ways with me personally but more importantly with others.”

Howard didn’t make Australians racist, but he did make casual racism respectable again, and retarded our country’s journey on that learning curve that many are always on, re-evaluating the past, interrogating our assumptions, examining our behaviour. We now have a reputation. Visitors notice it. BBC correspondent Nick Bryant, who was stationed here for several years, noted the casual racism in “polite company”; the British-American comedian John Oliver found Australia “sensational” yet also “one of the most comfortably racist places I’ve ever been in. They’ve really settled into their intolerance like an old resentful slipper.”

It remains enmeshed in our political sphere, precisely because it is believed to be good politics. It pollutes our asylum seeker policy. And, yes, behaviour at the elite level does trickle down.

That is John Howard’s chief legacy, and it’s not one to be proud of. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The three earlier volumes presented the fledgling colonies first as pioneers of liberalism, then as pacesetters in removing obstacles to self-fulfilment, and finally as a social laboratory that took state experiments to excess. This latest instalment covers the forty years from 1926 to 1966.

A Liberal State opens with the failure of the conservative Bruce–Page government to curb profligacy and protect the national interest from sectional demands. An election at the end of 1929 brought Labor into office just twelve days before the Wall Street crash. The inability of the new government, led by James Scullin, to deal with the economic crisis precipitated a split between the moderates (“liberal socialists”) and extremists (“anti-capitalist utopians”), resolved when Joseph Lyons, the leader of the moderates, defected. The United Australia Party swept back into office under his leadership in December 1931 and restored prudent economic management.

Aspects of Kemp’s treatment of these events could be questioned. He sees nothing untoward in a group of Melbourne businessmen inducing Lyons to jump ship, nor in the clandestine conservative organisations that appointed themselves guardians of the nation’s honour. Given that the Depression engulfed even the most orthodox economies, attributing Australia’s predicament to a departure from economic orthodoxy is myopic and his explanation of how Australia recovered less than convincing. But left-leaning treatments of this profound economic and political crisis carry their own crotchets.

More idiosyncratic is Kemp’s juxtaposition of moderate Labor reformists and “anti-capitalist utopians,” with their false doctrine of class warfare. It’s a particularly inapposite term since Marx and Engels distinguished their own scientific socialism from the utopian socialism of predecessors such as Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, who offered only a moral critique of competitive individualism that failed to explain how capitalism created such divisions.

Nineteenth-century liberals sought to remove the restrictions that prevented individuals from enjoying a full measure of freedom, and to devise forms of government that would safeguard their liberties. In earlier volumes Kemp showed how Australians drew on the arguments of liberal theorists such as Bentham, Mill and Green. In this volume he uses Hayek, Friedman and Rand as equivalent guides in the twentieth-century battle to throw back the encroachment of the state and resist the malign influence of anti-capitalist utopianism. But they had little presence in Australia at this time. Although a local edition of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom appeared shortly after its publication in Britain in 1944, to claim it exercised “a profound influence” is gross exaggeration. Milton Friedman was little known before he toured Australia in 1975. Most Australians had no idea who Ayn Rand was until Malcolm Fraser declared his admiration of her work.

The lengthy summaries of these and other prophets of neoliberalism contribute little to the argument of this book. There is a roll call of influential Australian thinkers in the opening chapter — economists, political scientists, lawyers and historians — but they make rare appearances in the rest of the volume. The Sydney philosopher John Anderson, who inculcated a generation of students with his hostility to the servile state, is allowed a single sentence. Far-sighted businessmen fare better, but the outcome of the battle is determined by Robert Menzies, who dominates the narrative from his entry into politics in 1928 until his retirement in 1966.

Thirty years ago, when Judith Brett published Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, her close examination of Menzies’s celebrated evocation of liberal values, she remarked on the sharp differences in how our longest-serving prime minister was remembered. Some thought of him as the grand old man of the Liberal Party who bested the socialists and presided over the postwar boom with dignity and aplomb. For those on the left he was an opportunist who preyed on the gullibility of the Australian people, an instinctive authoritarian who feigned liberal convictions. A third and later view held by those who came of age in the 1960s was of an absurd anachronism who imprisoned Australia in timorous complacency. To these three positions can now be added a fourth, that of the great majority who have no memory of Menzies at all.

David Kemp subscribes to the first view; indeed, he admires Menzies — “one of the world’s most brilliant political leaders” — even more fervently than the former prime minister’s principal biographer, Allan Martin. After quickly exhausting the possibilities of state politics, Menzies entered federal parliament in 1934 as “the most articulate and passionate supporter of liberalism” and immediately joined the cabinet. But how liberal was he? On some questions of domestic policy, such as book censorship, he brought reform. On the burning international issue of fascist aggression, his support of appeasement extended to penalising maritime workers for refusing to load pig iron for Japan’s military build-up and chiding domestic critics of the fascist regimes.

The 1930s confronted liberals with what Kemp calls “the two deadly hatreds of the twentieth century: class and race.” Menzies’s rejection of class-based politics, both the domestic version he claimed was holding the community to ransom and the communist one of abolishing all other classes, was never in doubt. Nor was he tempted by fascism, with its exaltation of racial purity, elimination of dissent and glorification of violence — though Kemp gives a very generous reading of Menzies’s statement after a visit to Nazi Germany in 1938 praising “the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State.”

Kemp’s Menzies is a man of outstanding qualities: intelligence, eloquence, courtesy, courage and principle. A man who refused to engage in personal attacks, he endured extraordinary abuse from his enemies on the left who saw that he was the chief obstacle to their ambitions. If he had a weakness in the early part of his career, it was a lack of empathy with lesser mortals. As Kemp puts it, he determined his course of action on the basis of rational deliberation and saw no need to win over colleagues.

The missing element in this assessment is ambition. “When I am a man I intend to be prime minister,” the young Menzies told his school classmates. It was a burning ambition that brought no end of trouble in the first part of his career. As a neophyte in the Victorian parliament he resigned in protest at the expediency of the premier. As a senior federal minister in 1939, he tired of waiting for the easygoing Joseph Lyons to vacate the prime ministership, and resigned again.

With this impatience came an unfortunate habit of demonstrating his superiority by putting others down. When a well-meaning senator warned that “Your great trouble, Bob, is that you don’t suffer fools gladly,” Menzies snapped back, “And what, pray, do you think I am doing now?” “Ah, poor Bob,” remarked John Curtin, then leader of the opposition, “it’s very sad; he would rather make a point than make a friend.”

These weaknesses brought Menzies down just two years after he succeeded Lyons as prime minister in 1939. After losing the confidence of his party in August 1941, he spent the next eight years in the political wilderness. I don’t think Kemp provides an adequate explanation of what went wrong, for he moves immediately to the radio broadcasts Menzies gave during the following year, which were published as The Forgotten People and foreshadowed the renovated liberalism that supposedly restored his fortunes. In fact it took much longer for him to do that.

Menzies had barely set foot in The Lodge when the outbreak of the second world war imposed demands he was unable to meet. The new prime minister’s early declaration that Australia should maintain “business as usual,” later held against him as betraying a lack of resolution, is better understood as a determination to reconcile necessary war measures with a minimum of unnecessary intrusion into people’s lives. Yet the government’s restrictive economic measures antagonised business interests, just as entrusting Keith Murdoch with press censorship alienated the other newspaper proprietors. Disaffected rivals, meanwhile, accused the prime minister of not doing enough. In the end it was a failure to unite the country behind the war effort that brought him undone.

The road back was much bumpier than Kemp suggests. And despite a claim to the contrary, Menzies did the Labor prime minister Curtin no favours. Menzies was the sole dissident among the state and federal leaders who met in December 1942 to thrash out arrangements for postwar reconstruction. In March 1943 he formed the National Service Group, his own party within a party, and used it to undermine Artie Fadden, the leader of the opposition in the election later that year. This “stab in the back,” Fadden observed, marked “another betrayal in the series for which Mr Menzies has become notorious.” And at the beginning of 1944 he withdrew from the Advisory War Council, the bipartisan forum through which he had enlisted Curtin’s support earlier in the year.

As with the earlier volumes, A Liberal State draws on a mixture of contemporary sources, memoirs, biographies and specialist studies. Kemp has read a large body of research literature and is generous in acknowledging the work of scholars unsympathetic to his cause. The weakest passages come when he falls back on partisan nonsense. A striking example is the claim that communist-led unions kept up strikes throughout the war to disrupt war industries and deny Australian troops vital supplies.

Kemp relies here on a book by Hal G.P. Colebatch that is riddled with errors. It alleges a campaign of sabotage on the wharves, yet even in the first two years, when communists opposed the war, the time lost in industrial disputes was just a few hours per member per year. The majority of strikes occurred in the mining industry, as they did in Britain and the United States, but these were unofficial pit stoppages that communist union leaders opposed. So far from disrupting the war effort, communists restrained the militancy of workers who were fed up with long hours, rationing and shortages of consumer goods, wage-pegging at a time of full employment, and government regulations preventing them from taking better-paid jobs.

With Menzies back in office at the end of 1949, we are in more familiar territory. The following seventeen years are allocated less than a third of the book’s 500,000 words and contain fewer surprises. The international and domestic cold war absorbed much of the government’s attention until its resounding re-election victory in 1955 released “a great period of policy success” for Australian liberalism as growing prosperity allowed greater public outlays on services that enhanced freedom of choice.

Even then, it is noticeable that the Menzies administration retained financial controls, tariff protection and industrial assistance. The prime minister, we are told, preferred to let protection come under challenge than remove it, just as he waited on white South Africa to realise that apartheid had to go. White Australia, meanwhile, was allowed to run down. Disliking identity politics, the prime minister was quite happy for women to enter parliament, but only on “merit,” and kept the marriage bar on women in the public service out of a conviction that its disappearance needed to be gradual. This is hardly the stance of a paragon of liberalism, more the final destination of a pragmatic conservative.

The most striking feature of Kemp’s painstaking history of Australian liberalism is its inclusion of what used to be called Aboriginal policy. As in his chairing of the Australian Heritage Council, this recognition of the illiberal regimens that operated throughout this and earlier periods is a welcome departure from the history wars of the past. •

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Morrison is sometimes depicted as a more transactional, flexible and opportunistic leader, reflecting his background in marketing, whereas Howard was generally seen as remarkably consistent in his views. Yet many of Morrison’s and Howard’s positions are surprisingly similar. As immigration minister, Morrison built on Howard’s resistance to asylum seekers arriving by boat. Howard had his “mainstream” Australians (often code for Anglo-Celts in traditional gender relationships); Morrison has his “quiet Australians,” the people who are not “shouty voices on the fringes telling us what we’re supposed to be angry and outraged about” but get on with working hard to support their families. Both Howard and Morrison attempted to appeal to a wide range of Australians, including traditional Labor voters.

The pair also share socially conservative beliefs. They both opposed marriage equality, with Morrison being one of the few parliamentarians who absented themselves from parliament when the legislation was passed following the postal vote survey. Howard’s Methodist background may seem more conventional than Morrison’s Pentecostal one, but both have been influenced by American conservative religious values rather than forms of Christianity that place more emphasis on “social justice” concerns.

But Morrison’s religious views often reflect more recent debates than those prevalent during the Howard era. Morrison has railed against “gender whisperers” seeking to raise transgender issues in schools. He has denounced gender-inclusive notices on toilet doors in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as “ridiculous” “political correctness.” The Morrison government might have been more supportive of facilitating equality for women than the Howard government but, like Howard, Morrison dismisses feminist critiques of government economic policy as divisive.

Morrison’s attitudes also reflect the apparent influence of the “prosperity gospel,” an American version of Christianity that sees wealth as a God-given reward and poverty as a penalty for the less deserving. Under Morrison, Howard’s mutual obligation requirements for unemployment benefit recipients have been reinforced by a “fair go for those who have a go” mantra. Morrison’s relatively early winding back of more generous Covid-19 related JobKeeper and JobSeeker benefits, along with the small size of the permanent increase to JobSeeker and its strict job search requirements, suggests that he retains his previous views.

Morrison’s attitude to welfare payments gel with his general economic views. Prior to the pandemic, his economic policy reflected a neoliberal, free market approach that was similar to John Howard’s. Both men see tax cuts for business as a way of stimulating economic growth, although Morrison advocates even greater challenges to Australia’s progressive income tax system (which requires those on higher incomes to pay a higher percentage of tax).

Nonetheless, there are significant differences between Morrison and Howard’s views as prime ministers, as well as between the challenges they face.

Clearly Covid-19 has contributed to major, though possibly temporary, shifts in Liberal Party economic orthodoxy. The role of government has grown, and so have budget deficits. But it is a sign of Howard’s stature within the party that Morrison consulted him about going massively into debt to tackle the economic impact of the pandemic. Both he and treasurer Josh Frydenberg were reassured by Howard’s agreement that “no ideological constraints” should be applied at such an unprecedented and dangerous time.

Some social attitudes have also changed since Howard’s day. Howard famously refused to apologise to the stolen generations of Indigenous children, for example, whereas Morrison recently gave an ungrudging apology that built on Kevin Rudd’s apology of thirteen years ago. But it remains to be seen how far the Morrison government will go towards reconciliation, with a clearer government position on Indigenous Voice proposals expected towards the middle of 2021, after the current consultation process.

It is often forgotten that differences also exist in relation to climate change. Despite his reservations about the arguments, Howard went to the 2007 election pledging to introduce an emissions trading scheme and thereby a price on carbon. By contrast, the Morrison government has been happy to suggest that Labor’s relatively modest climate change policies will destroy the economy and cost working-class jobs.

Howard and Morrison also face a very different era in international relations. Howard repeatedly argued that Australia could retain a predominantly Anglo-Celtic identity and values while maintaining good relations with its Asian trading partners. He also suggested that Australia would play a major role in facilitating good relations between China and the United States. A combination of Western-centrism and economic reductionism led to the widespread assumption that the West would remain economically dominant and that China would increasingly liberalise as its economy developed.

Instead we face major challenges to Western economies from Asian competition and an increasingly authoritarian and assertive China under president Xi Jinping. US tensions with China continue to rise. Australia–China trade, security and diplomatic relations are at a many-decades low, with major implications for the Australian economy.

The pandemic has also revealed serious problems in international supply chains and Australia’s manufacturing capacity, especially an overreliance on Chinese manufacturing and a lack of government support for Australian industry. Morrison has acknowledged a “sovereign capability” crisis and pledged to tackle it. But it isn’t clear how well his government will be able to do this, particularly given the Liberal Party’s traditional reservations regarding government intervention in the economy. Pro-business industrial relations reform is part of the package but Morrison is being more cautious than Howard was when he introduced his electorally costly WorkChoices legislation.

Even if managing the pandemic goes smoothly and vaccinations help bring Covid-19 under control, Morrison faces major challenges. Many workers and businesses will continue to feel the impact of the pandemic and will oppose moves to reduce government support in order to rein in government debt. Rebuilding a strong Australian economy will not be as simple as sometimes suggested. By contrast, the Howard government had the benefit of a major mining boom and a massive increase in government revenues.

So, despite some key similarities, Scott Morrison faces very different circumstances from those John Howard faced. Howard famously asserted that “the times will suit me,” and in many ways they did. Morrison is riding high in the polls and, despite the various scandals, is still the favourite to win the next election. But there’s no guarantee the times will continue to suit him. •

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After one of the most turbulent weeks of his political career, though, there is no sign of the embattled Kelly. A large picture of the four-term MP stares out from his office window against an image of the Australian flag in which the Union Jack seems the most striking symbol. Blinds to the street are drawn, and the office looks closed.

“One thing about the Liberals is they don’t have long memories,” says Ian Hancock, historian of the party’s NSW division, when I ask him later about the implications of the rumoured challenge to Kelly’s preselection. “But a long memory in the Liberal Party comes into play when things are going badly.”

For the seat of Hughes, that would be about now.

An outspoken climate change sceptic from the party’s right, Kelly has troubled Scott Morrison’s government even more over his social media campaign against its Covid-19 strategy. The drama came to a head on 3 February when Labor’s Tanya Plibersek confronted Kelly in a Parliament House corridor and accused him of spreading “crazy conspiracy theories.” As a bevy of cameras recorded their confrontation, Plibersek reminded Kelly that her mother lived in his electorate, and declared she didn’t want her exposed to people who refused to be vaccinated because of Kelly’s campaign. So compelling was the encounter that the BBC ran the footage on its main news page.

It was only then that Morrison carpeted Kelly and told him to toe the government’s line. But the dispute kept mounting. On 12 February, Facebook was reported to have removed one of Kelly’s posts in which he opposed children wearing face masks during the pandemic.

The row has raised speculation that Kelly could face serious competition for preselection before the next federal election, which could take place as early as the second half of this year. Just days earlier Kevin Andrews, another seasoned Liberal right-winger, had lost preselection for his safe seat of Menzies in Melbourne. With the Liberal Party more polarised than ever, and the government holding a lower house majority of just three seats, questions are being asked about the likelihood of even more preselection clashes.

Ian Hancock doesn’t rule them out. And he argues that safe Liberal seats could be at more risk of challengers than marginals, at least based on trends from recent years. He cites a version of advice attributed to Enoch Powell, a former British Conservative politician. “For God’s sake win a marginal seat,” Powell once said. No one will challenge you while it stays marginal, and “you can then put your stamp on it and make it a safe seat.”

Over the past eight years, independents have captured two seats long considered impregnably safe Liberal: Indi in Victoria and Warringah in Sydney. After Zali Steggall defeated former prime minister Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, she put her stamp on the seat by campaigning strongly for action on climate change on behalf of voters fed up with Abbott’s climate denialism.

“These are the sorts of seat the Liberals won’t lose to Labor but to an independent who’s got presence in the electorate,” says Hancock. “Warringah will now be hard for them to get back.” Simple arithmetic dictates that safe seats are more vulnerable because it’s often easier for an independent to get into second place before preferences are distributed.

Hancock sees two forces at play in Kevin Andrews’s preselection loss. Andrews had been the seat’s MP for thirty years, and some Victorian Liberals reckoned it was time for generational change. “This is a very strong thing in Liberal history,” says Hancock. “You don’t hold on to a safe seat if you’re going nowhere.” And enough Liberals saw Andrews as too conservative. He was remembered as the Howard-era immigration minister who cancelled the visa of Mohamed Haneef, an Indian-born doctor, whom Australian authorities had wrongly accused of being linked to a terrorist act in Britain. More recently, he was seen as a strong Abbott supporter.

In Hughes, variations of the forces of change in those other Liberal seats could now determine Craig Kelly’s fate. Hughes (named after former prime minister Billy Hughes) was once solidly Labor, until the transformation of tradies from employees to small businesspeople helped turn it Liberal in the mid 1990s.

The seat embraces the Royal National Park, south of Sydney, and adjoins Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook, facing Botany Bay, on its eastern side. Kelly, a former small businessman, has held Hughes since 2010. Moves were made to challenge him for preselection at the 2016 and 2019 elections, but Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, as respective prime ministers, intervened to stop them. Kelly won the 2019 election with almost 60 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. That was before anyone had heard of Covid-19.

If Kelly faces another competitive bid to take his Liberal candidacy, the most likely challenger would be Kent Johns, who tried to win preselection at the last two elections. Johns has a broader political background than Kelly: once a Labor mayor of Rockdale City Council, he joined the Liberal Party when he was elected to Sutherland Shire Council, where he has been a member for seventeen years, including twice as mayor. He’s also a former vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party.

Johns is avoiding any limelight for now. But the local paper, the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, says he’s “poised” for another preselection battle and his supporters “are confident he has the numbers to beat Mr Kelly.” Since the political explosion over Kelly’s Covid-19 crusade, three more potential preselection challengers have been reported. And an online community group, We Are Hughes, says it’s searching for an independent candidate to take on Kelly, using the electorates of Indi and Warringah as models. The group will highlight the popular complaint that Kelly seems to spend more time promoting himself and his views on social media and sympathetic radio and television shows than he does in his electorate.

“If a high-profile independent campaign does get under way in Hughes, then I predict Craig Kelly will not be the Liberal candidate,” ABC election analyst Antony Green recently tweeted. “The Liberal Party felt loyalty to support Tony Abbott in Warringah in 2019, but I doubt they will have the same view on Craig Kelly.”

A Liberal figure in Hughes takes a similar view of Kelly’s prospects if a preselection challenge happens: “Either a moderate will win or a right-winger will win. That right-winger won’t be Craig Kelly.”

Ian Hancock claims no specific feel for the twists and turns of Hughes. But from his broader perspective, he sees the responses among some Liberals to Kelly’s outlandish views as a sign that the party’s factions will play a key role in the future of Hughes.

In New South Wales, he says, the right faction revived under Bronwyn Bishop, a “factional player, a winner-take-all person” prominent during the Howard government, who herself fell victim to a preselection challenge in 2016. But that’s now changed: “The so-called moderates have come back in New South Wales. They’ve become better organised and they may want to get rid of Kelly.”

Indeed, Kelly’s views on climate and Covid-19 are so outside the mainstream that even Morrison may be too wary of the potential electoral damage to save him a second time. If so, Kent Johns could stand a chance. He’s considered a Liberal moderate, and supports a carbon-neutral economy by 2050.

To Hancock, though, another scenario is equally possible. “The factions could agree to do a deal before the election: leave Kelly in Hughes, and in return give the moderates another seat elsewhere,” he says. “The Liberals have learned from Labor to do these factional deals. I wouldn’t have thought Kelly’s days are done. It would be unwise, and a poor reading of Liberal history, to write him off. He’s a man who takes a stand on what he believes. Don’t forget that some Liberals like that.”

On one point, Hancock is pretty certain. “I’d expect any Hughes preselection contest to be held later rather than sooner,” he says. “It would be a case of ‘let’s get through this disaster and hold off for a while.’”

Hancock’s writing about the Liberals gives him a wide authority for such analysis. His biographies have covered the lives of party figures including John Gorton, a former prime minister; Tom Hughes, a former attorney-general in Gorton’s government and still, at ninety-seven, a respected legal figure; Nick Greiner, a former NSW premier; and Ainsley Gotto, Gorton’s former private secretary, who went on to a successful business career.

Hancock is working on yet another biography that will give him an even longer view of the workings of Australian conservative politics. His latest subject is Josiah Henry Symon, a father of Federation. “He arrived in Australia from Scotland in 1866 at the age of twenty with just two boxes of books,” says Hancock. “He went on to become a senator and a master criminal lawyer.” It’s a career that couldn’t be more different from that of the divisive member for Hughes. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Neither victory was a surprise, but their extent was. In the ACT’s case, that’s partly because media commentary (apart from Inside Story’s) ignored the only reputable opinion poll and last year’s federal election voting in assuming the Liberals had a strong chance of victory.

Covid-19 certainly played a role in both Labo(u)r victories: it has demonstrated the importance of good government as nothing else has since the second world war, and that gave the parties in government an unequalled platform to demonstrate their competence — or otherwise.

These two election outcomes add to the probability that Annastacia Palaszczuk will receive a similar endorsement from her voters on 31 October — and that Donald Trump will be turfed out for his incompetence in handling the virus when Americans vote four days later.

ACT chief minister Andrew Barr’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis was smooth and successful. The city has had only 113 cases, mostly acquired overseas. No cases have been diagnosed for three months. Some restrictions remain, but the crisis has been handled with less panic and more pragmatism than in most of Australia.

It has allowed a leader whose popularity was wearing thin to re-establish himself in the eyes of his electorate. In the televised leaders’ debate two weeks ago, Barr came over well: warm, reassuring, an apparently safe pair of hands. By contrast, Liberal leader Alistair Coe campaigned by staging a series of juvenile stunts — in the final one, pulling a rates notice out of an esky to publicise his pledge to freeze rates. He seemed to underrate the intelligence of Canberra’s voters.

The biggest winners were ACT Greens leader Shane Rattenbury and his team. After two disappointing territory elections, the Greens have surged back, winning close to the vote they get there at federal elections. They have earned the right to take on a much bigger role in the next Labor–Greens coalition government.

That government, which began back in 2001, will continue until at least 2024, matching the twenty-three-year federal government of Sir Robert Menzies and his successors from 1949 to 1972.

When counting ended on Saturday night, Labor had won ten of the twenty-five seats in the ACT Legislative Assembly, and the Greens five. The Liberals had won only eight seats, and two were still in doubt: one between Labor and Liberals, one between Labor and Greens.

In net terms, the Greens have gained either three or four seats. The Liberals have lost either two or three, and Labor could end up with no net change, or a loss of one or two seats.

(Yes, these are different from the figures Antony Green gave last night in wrapping up the ACT’s election coverage. Antony is usually excellent, and I can only assume that last night he was on screen so much that he didn’t have time to take a close look at the complex preference distributions circulated by the ACT Electoral Commission, showing provisional results based on votes cast electronically in pre-poll booths.)

Because of Covid-19 fears, even the Covid-free ACT had its election shaped by the virus. Everyone was urged to vote at one of thirteen pre-poll centres, and two-thirds of the voters did so. Almost all of them voted using an electronic screen, which meant their votes could be counted and preferences distributed and posted by 9pm.

On first preferences, the Greens’ vote climbed 3.6 per cent from the 2016 election, and the Liberals’ vote slumped by 3.6 per cent. Labor was down 0.1 per cent. After preferences, the swing was even bigger: on my estimates from the provisional preference distribution, the three-party vote for the Greens has soared by 4.5 per cent, with the Liberals down 4 per cent and Labor down 0.5 per cent.

The Liberals’ position will improve slightly today and in coming days as postal votes and pre-poll votes on the traditional paper ballots are counted. But this is where the votes ended up last night in the ACT’s five Senate-style electorates:

Brindabella (outer south, district of Tuggeranong): was Liberals three, Labor two; now two-all with one in doubt. The three-party swing against the Liberals was 7 per cent, mostly to the Greens. Liberal MLA Andrew Wall’s seat has been lost to either Labor or the Greens. Last night Labor led by thirty-five votes or just 0.08 per cent.

Murrumbidgee (middle south, Woden and Weston Creek): was Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one. Despite Liberal expectations of gaining a third seat, thanks to a favourable redistribution and the retirement of the Greens MLA, those numbers remain the same. Emma Davidson will be the new Greens MLA, replacing Caroline Le Couteur, while Labor MLA Bec Cody lost her seat to running mate Marisa Paterson.

Kurrajong (inner suburbs, north and south of the lake): was Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one; now Liberals one, Labor two, Greens two. As in last year’s federal election on the same turf, the Greens outpolled the Liberals after preferences. At the cut-off point on the provisional preference distribution, the Greens’ second candidate, Rebecca Vassarotti, had 15.2 per cent of the vote to 13.3 per cent for Liberal MLA Candice Burch. That’s too big a gap to make up on the count remaining.

Ginninderra (middle northern suburbs, Belconnen): was Liberals two, Labor three; now Liberals one, Labor two, Greens one, and one in doubt. This is where the Coalition hoped its veteran one-time leader, Bill Stefaniak, could take a seat from Labor for his Belco party, based on resentment that Belconnen has been left out of the Barr government’s largesse. Not so: instead, the Greens’ Jo Clay has claimed one seat, probably from the Liberals, but possibly at the cost of Labor attorney-general Gordon Ramsay.

Yerrabi (outer north, district of Gungahlin): was Liberals two, Labor three. Now Liberals two, Labor two, Greens one. Alistair Coe’s own electorate was the only one to record a swing to the Liberals, and a strong one at that — but still not big enough to claim the last seat. Instead the Greens’ Andrew Braddock has unseated the capital’s first Indian-Australian MLA, Deepak-Raj Gupta.

On first preferences, the night finished with Labor on 38.4 per cent, the Liberals 33.1, the Greens 13.9 per cent and others 14.7. But whereas the preferences of the “others” in 2016 largely favoured the Liberals, this time they have spread more evenly among the three biggest parties. Crucially, that has lifted the Greens’ share of the three-party vote to 18 per cent — in a voting system where 16.67 per cent is the threshold to win a seat.

Hence the dramatic rise in their representation from two seats to five or six, almost a quarter of the Assembly. It still fell short of the 20 per cent the Greens won at last year’s federal election, but it makes the partnership with Labor less unequal, and lifts them to a new level of importance in the government.

After patiently biding his time as the Greens’ sole minister since 2012, Rattenbury hinted last night that he will demand a bigger share of portfolios: particularly planning, where Labor’s pro-development policies have put it offside with resident groups. Barr might well be happy to pass on that hot potato to his coalition partner.

As in New Zealand, a new term will intensify demands on the government to implement Labor’s stated goals of looking after those worst-off: something the Barr and Ardern governments have both failed to do. Coe had promised, if he won, to appoint former Labor chief minister Jon Stanhope — one of Barr’s sharpest critics — to chair an inquiry into poverty in the ACT. Barr would be well advised to try to make peace with his old boss, and invite him back inside the tent to help shape policy.

A dark fiscal cloud overshadowing the coming term will be the government’s pledge to build a second tramline from the city to southern Canberra, in the wake of its popular but expensive tramline to Gungahlin in the outer north. Canberra has been designed for cars, not trams, and the new line will be costly both to build and to operate. Initial estimates are around $2 billion, in a city of 430,000 people.

The impact of building something you can’t afford is that everything else has to make room for it, and therefore becomes a lesser priority. Canberra’s rates and taxes have risen, and its service levels in many areas have fallen. Labor’s 2016 plan to redevelop Canberra Hospital was recycled as its plan for the 2020 election.

So why weren’t the Liberals able to take advantage of this? On Saturday night, retiring MLA Vicki Dunne blamed the failure on the way Covid-19 has put governments centre-stage in controlling the agenda. With respect, that hardly applies in Covid-free Canberra. Part of the Liberals’ problem, surely, was that their young, stunt-addicted, ultraconservative leader did not come across as a credible chief minister for a place like the ACT.

In Massachusetts, the Republicans keep winning government because they put up liberal leaders who fit the state’s political culture. In Victoria, the Liberals have won just one election this century, and that was under the liberal Ted Baillieu. In New South Wales, they have won three elections in a row under three moderate leaders. It’s not a hard lesson to learn; it’s just too hard for the conservative wing of the party to accept. And in the ACT, the conservative wing rules.

By 2024, Labor will have been in government for twenty-three years. It was after twenty-three years of federal Coalition government that Gough Whitlam was swept to power on the slogan “It’s Time.” Whitlam had positioned himself, his frontbench and his party well to offer themselves as the alternative government. Can the ACT Liberals learn the lesson and position themselves to be a credible alternative government in 2024? •

Friday 23 October update

Counting on Thursday effectively confirmed that the Greens have relegated the Liberals to third place in the central electorate of Kurrajong. Rebecca Vassarotti, a community activist with wide experience, is set to replace Liberal MLA Candice Burch in the Assembly. The Greens recovered lost ground in the first preference count, while Vassarotti expanded her lead in the count after preferences to 786 votes.

In Ginninderra (Belconnen), after preferences, Liberal lawyer Peter Cain maintains a ninety-eight vote lead over Labor’s attorney-general Gordon Ramsay. Labor still hopes it can hold the seat, as it is doing better on the postal vote count in Ginninderra than elsewhere. But it has to spread those votes between three candidates, whereas the Liberals only have two in the race.

The southern seat of Brindabella (Tuggeranong) remains on a knife-edge. At the end of Thursday’s counting, Green candidate Johnathan Davis was twenty-three votes ahead of Labor’s Taimus Werner-Gibbings. But between them is Andrew Wall, the Liberal MLA whose seat one of them will take. Wall can’t win the seat, but if Labor can overtake him when postal votes are distributed, it believes his preferences could then lift its man over the Green, and secure him the final seat. Possibly — but first he has to overtake Wall, and in Brindabella the Liberals have outpolled Labor in postal votes.

The first preference count is now almost over and the deadline for postal votes to be received ends at 5 pm tonight. The roughly 20,000 postal votes are being scanned into electronic form, and the computer will distribute their preferences on Saturday to give us the final result.

On the current count, Labor would win ten seats (down two), the Greens six (up four) and the Liberals nine (down two).

Greens members voted on Wednesday night in favour of remaining with Labor in a coalition government. This is expected to see them have two ministers in the next government instead of one, with leader Shane Rattenbury in a key portfolio.

The post Will the Liberals ever learn? appeared first on Inside Story.

It began in 2010 with the Labor government’s serial capitulation to the opposition’s campaign against its carbon pollution reduction scheme; first it dropped the policy, then it dropped the prime minister. If it had held its nerve it would have easily won re-election, Tony Abbott would have been replaced as Liberal leader, and the chastened Coalition would have learnt the lesson that it aggressively opposes climate change action at its peril. A carbon price would have been introduced in the 2010–13 term, as one indeed was, but in this counter-scenario it would have survived a change of government.

There would still be plenty of argy-bargy about coal and gas and so on, but we’d be doing our bit.

But is all the fuss about Australian climate policy, ramped up this week by Scott Morrison’s announcement of a gas-fired recovery, really worth the effort? It’s reminiscent of the carry-on a decade and a half ago about Australia’s involvement in the Iraq invasion disaster. “Bush, Blair and Howard must be brought before the Hague!” In truth, Australia’s role in that catastrophe was minuscule. As none other than its undying supporter, the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan, put it a few years ago on Radio National, “We basically didn’t do anything in Iraq, and we didn’t do much in Afghanistan.”

We Australians have a chippy tendency to overstate our importance in world affairs, and action on global warming is a prime example.

And spare us all the “moral challenge” guff (thanks for that, Kevin). The task is deeply technocratic, like tariff reduction was decades ago. Short-term pain for long-term gain, while prioritising people who find themselves out of a job. But the problem — the reason we succumb to freeloading — is that the effort needs to be collective. Whether we (or any small- to medium-sized country) does its bit on its own is largely irrelevant.

During last summer’s bushfires, the world’s media consumers were introduced to Scott Morrison as a “climate change denier.” It’s more accurate to say he’s a denier of the desirability of Australia’s taking much action. And that’s because his party and its Coalition partner are riven by the issue. As David Crowe pointed out in the Nine papers on Friday, some on the right of the Coalition even object to the PM’s prioritising of gas over coal.

It’s autumn in the United States, and they’re suffering heat and horrendous fires reminiscent of our own (was it only nine months ago?). The themes in the coverage are familiar to Australians, from denial/nitpicking about the role of global warming to social media stories about left-wing activists starting the fires. But there is one big difference.

America produces about 15 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, while Australia emits about 1 per cent, so the entreaties to “do something!” make more sense there. It’s not a stretch to say that unilateral action would make a difference.

More importantly, America (still) has international clout. Democrat contender Joe Biden’s climate change policy devotes many words to the “Green new deal,” but there’s also a fair bit about prodding the world to act (mostly aimed at China, overtly or otherwise). He “will ensure [climate change] commitments are transparent and enforceable,” for instance, and use “America’s economic leverage and power of example” to “stop countries from cheating.” The United States will “no longer separate trade policy from our climate objectives.”

Here’s the kicker: “The Biden administration will impose carbon adjustment fees or quotas on carbon-intensive goods from countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.” Last year the European Union (about 17 per cent of greenhouse gases) announced similar ambitions. Such plans send shivers down the spine of observers who detect creeping protectionism, but they might be the planet’s best hope.

The problem — and not just in Australia, although we are among the worst — is the old prisoner’s dilemma: why should each country do anything when individually it makes so little difference? A “carbon border adjustment” of the kind mooted by Biden and the European Union says to other countries, “We’re pricing our own carbon, and if you don’t do the same, we’ll do it for you on your exports — and pocket the proceeds.” So much easier to sell domestically than a unilateral carbon price. Taxing imports and subsidising exports might offend policy purists, but its visceral appeal, particularly in a climate of growing nationalism, cannot be denied.

America’s taxing — sorry, “adjusting” — China’s imports would encourage the latter to get serious about tackling its addiction to coal. That would reduce its imports of our coal, and be a step towards making redundant the hand-wringing in this country about the “embedded” carbon in our exports.

With luck, this scheme would prove contagious. Countries would respond by pricing their own carbon (so they get the revenue), at least in their exports and, to lessen the pain, creating their own border adjustments.

(Biden does not promise an actual carbon price for America, but it, or an implicit price, which the “new deal” and actions already being taken could be characterised as, would need to be part of the equation.)

Yes, border adjustments would decrease the effectiveness of a carbon price in the United States (and in any country that implemented one), precisely because it mitigates the impact of that price on local producers. Is that such a bad thing? It makes the policy more saleable to a domestic audience. And in the long run either the planet is a lot hotter, with all the misery and economic mayhem that would entail, or (virtually) everyone is pricing carbon. And if everyone is pricing carbon, the mechanism makes no difference, it could be Australian 2012–14-style carbon prices, consumption taxes, border adjustment or something else.

The Business Council of Australia calls such schemes “carbon protection.” There are certainly potential problems and perverse incentives, but then the option of unilaterally pricing carbon (as we did for two years) has them as well, with encouraging manufacturers to move offshore the big daddy of them all.

Even with an internationally agreed set of rules, border adjustments would be messy. And the danger of a trade war would be real. But would that be worse than the alternative?

Australian global warming politics is broken. If we’re too hopeless to price our carbon, someone else should price it for us.

Worrying about what our government does or does not do about all this is not worth the stress. What would potentially make a huge difference is a big Biden win, with a Democrat-controlled Senate, in November.

That is something to hope for. •

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It is a lively book, in a jolly-hockey-sticks kind of way, and Pyne doesn’t make too many demands on his reader. There is no deep introspection, no dark night of the soul comparable to Turnbull’s account of his deep depression after he was rejected as party leader in 2009. John Howard kept Pyne on the backbench for somewhat longer than his talents likely warranted, but Christopher seems to have taken it on the chin. We gain few insights into the effects of such disappointments, the emotional demands of politics, or the impact of a public career on one’s family life.

In fact, most of the people he encounters in his political career seemingly become “a friend of mine.” If true, it would suggest that the old line credited to Harry S. Truman — that anyone wanting a friend in Washington needed to buy a dog — doesn’t translate to Canberra.

Like Turnbull, Pyne can write; unlike Turnbull, he doesn’t leave the political scene bitter at the behaviour of a large coterie of enemies. Pyne says he wanted to be prime minister — don’t they all? — but he was never going to fly that high. And unlike all but a few of those who do fly that high, he was able to leave politics in a manner of his own choosing. If he did lose a friend or two along the way — he fell out with Mathias Cormann over the plot against Turnbull — he (metaphorically) kissed and made up.

In the House of Representatives at the age of twenty-five and there for twenty-six years, with only a very brief period as a lawyer, Pyne has had no career outside politics. That makes this book an insight into the modern political class, for which this broad career trajectory is now standard fare. Private school, law degree from sandstone university, student politics, a bit of time as a staffer along the way — he worked for Amanda Vanstone, who provides this book’s foreword — and then a political career before leaving for the richer material rewards of the private sector. This is what a modern professional politician looks like. If you don’t like it, well too bad: that’s how it is.

It has its benefits. Politics might be a profession unlike any other, but it is like all the others in demanding a certain kind of expertise to be done with any success. Pyne clearly has the skills that are needed to practise it effectively. He versed himself in parliamentary procedure and was rewarded when he became leader of the House during the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison era. He also has the gift of the gab and handles media well. He is among a group of politicians who, in collusion with political journalists such as Annabel Crabb (whose endorsement graces the book’s cover), have turned politics into a minor branch of the entertainment industry.

Pyne is quite frank about the degree of self-interested cooperation that occurs within this mutual admiration society. With some exaggeration no doubt, he informs us that “Crabb has made something of a life’s work of trying to make me look normal in the public eye.” Pyne is, of course, making a little witticism, but it is an accurate enough account of the role of some political journalists in providing free PR for fellow members of the political class. Not that this stops Pyne from whining elsewhere in the book about the leftist bias of the ABC. He also makes it abundantly clear how much he enjoys his minor celebrity by devoting a large portion of the early part of the book to (mainly) favourable reviews of his own media career. The question of whether this kind of thing is good for either politics or show business is beyond the scope of this brief review.

Pyne is said to be outrageously witty, and pants-wettingly funny; but while not exactly dour, this is not an especially humorous book. Sometimes, it is hard to know whether Pyne is being serious or whether he is just having another of his little jokes, as when he tells us: “while it’s hard to imagine now, there were real climate change deniers in the Coalition in [2009], some in very senior positions.” For most of us, this requires no stretch of the imagination at all. “[Peta] Credlin had always described me as being like family to Abbott and to her,” he also reports. Here, I would really like to give Pyne the credit for an especially subtle piece of humour, but I suspect it might be inadvertent. And I suppose there was a sense of humour at work in the appointment of former defence minister David Johnston — you might recall him as the bloke who said he wouldn’t trust the Australian Submarine Corporation to “build a canoe” — as an Australian defence exports advocate. This is chutzpah of a rare kind and it deserves our admiration.

Whenever I looked at or listened to Pyne, I was always reminded of the character in the third of the British House of Cards trilogy, The Final Cut, Geoffrey Booza-Pitt, played by Nickolas Grace. Wikipedia gets him right: “a lesser member of Urquhart’s cabinet… He is something of a ‘character,’ cheerfully upper-class with a slightly eccentric sense of humour, notable for wearing colourful waistcoats and bow ties.” This is not quite Pyne but it will do, and the physical resemblance in Grace’s portrayal is uncanny.

There isn’t much to Booza-Pitt except buffoonery and self-interest. There is rather more to Pyne than that, even if he seems to go out of his way to sound like an upper-class twit. This is no better illustrated than by his repeated references in the book to the fictitious couple of Amanda Vanstone’s invention, “Bob and Nancy Stringbag,” who are supposed to represent everyday Australians. That Pyne can do this without any apparent awareness of how condescending and elitist this looks says a great deal about what a quarter of a century as a professional politician will do to you. Bob and Nancy are essentially (white) noble savages: they have no interest in politics and are completely preoccupied with the everyday:

They enjoy life’s simple pleasures — camping with the kids, buying presents and sweets for their grandchildren, having one too many shandies with their mates and girlfriends but not judging others for the same peccadilloes… They see themselves as fair-minded and take their time to come around to change… They loathe being told what to do or what to think by their self-appointed betters.

And on it goes. It probably hasn’t occurred to Pyne that he looks rather like one of their self-appointed betters — such as when he thinks it worth remarking to Peter Dutton, while visiting Queensland, that quite a lot of the latter’s constituents are wearing ugg boots. The untutored Pyne assumed they were low-income, non-Liberal-voting types (Dutton corrected that impression for him). I suppose he deserves a tick for being willing to expose his own snobbery.

Even allowing that he occupied defence portfolios, Pyne is partial to military metaphors. He quotes a note he made in 2012: the strategy to get rid of the Gillard government is “war on all fronts at all times.” The tactics are “to engage and attack the enemy at every opportunity.” Abbott liked Pyne because he was a “warrior.” Pyne and his fellow Liberals are forever getting into “the trenches.” “I never shy away from a fight.” “I lead my troops towards the sound of battle, not away from it!” His time in Turnbull’s office dealing with the leadership crisis of August 2018 was like being in a tent of the Yorkists or Lancastrians in the War of the Roses. “Thursday morning was like the centre of the battlefield.”

And on and on it goes. Political psychologists would have a field day with this material, coming from a politician who has never been a soldier and never been on a battlefield, and who affected something of a dandified public image. Julia Gillard, it might be recalled, cruelly called him a “mincing poodle.”

“Has anyone ever seen one better?” he asks about Abbott as opposition leader, to which the answer would surely be “yes,” because Abbott’s aggression so poisoned the political well that he was unable to adjust to government and was gone in two years. “Like all good generals, Abbott led from the front,” we learn. In reality, it’s bad generals who lead from the front, because, like Major General Sir William Bridges and Tony Abbott, they tend to get shot down there. Pyne at least realises that Abbott’s was a miserable government, and he barely goes through the motions of trying to show that he was a successful education minister. (He wasn’t.)

Along the way are a few opinions and facts that some future political historians might decide to tuck into a footnote. He thinks that Scott Morrison has clean hands in relation to the falls of both Abbott and Turnbull. (Turnbull, in his own memoirs, suggests otherwise.) He thinks Abbott would have lost an election in 2016 if he had not been tipped out. He claims authorship of the idea of requiring a party-room majority to sign a petition calling for a spill of positions in August 2018. He was also responsible for Australia’s policy of supporting West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state — a blundering formulation, now adopted by Donald Trump, that had its origins in some opportunistic posturing to win the Wentworth by-election in 2018. He says that the party’s marginal seat polling indicated Turnbull would have won the 2019 election.

So what does this career of more than a quarter of a century in Australian federal politics amount to? Pyne assures us that he was responsible for “an entire reinventing of defence in Australia.” He spends a good deal of time telling us of his efforts to flog Australian-made military hardware to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. He claims some influence in securing defence industry investment for his hometown of Adelaide. He says he is the “father” of the Australian Space Agency. He is generously willing to share with Marise Payne credit for the “Pacific step-up.” He claims that he delivered the moderates to Scott Morrison in the leadership contest. (Is he seriously suggesting that without his influence, they would have voted for Dutton?) He finds he is a “hawk rather than a dove” on defence and foreign policy — “I was comfortable taking a stand” — but given that his career has never required him to make a significant stand on anything much, it’s hard to take the claim too seriously.

In the end, The Insider has value as an insight into what a representative specimen of an Australian professional politician looks like in the early twenty-first century. There’s no need to worry much over which party he belongs to. In the world of the Canberra insiders, such differences are superficial. When Labor’s David Feeney had to take his leave from parliament after forgetting to declare some investment property and falling foul of section 44 on citizenship, Pyne wanted to give him a job as a defence exports advocate. After all, he was “a very decent fellow.”

In good time, I’m sure, he would also have become “a friend of mine.” •

The post The thoroughly modern politician appeared first on Inside Story.

The two-party-preferred swings in the 2016–19 term ranged from 7.2 per cent towards the government — specifically towards Barnaby Joyce, who was Nationals leader, in New England — to 7.0 per cent towards Labor after Malcolm Turnbull’s resignation in Wentworth. But the Wentworth figure was counted out by the electoral commission purely for interest’s sake: the Labor candidate didn’t make it into the final round, and it was independent Kerryn Phelps who defeated Dave Sharma 51.2 to 48.8 per cent.

(Because Phelps didn’t run at the previous election, there could be no two-candidate-preferred swing either. Yes, one figure was widely reported — the difference between Malcolm Turnbull’s 2016 two-candidate-preferred vote and Sharma’s in 2018 — and at 19 per cent it made great headlines, but it was meaningless.)

In Bennelong the previous December, Labor’s Kristina Keneally had achieved a 4.8 per cent swing, which wasn’t too bad considering sitting Liberal John Alexander had recontested. Little was made of the result. Scribes didn’t furiously plot that 4.8 per cent on the pendulum to produce an oh-my-God massive Labor victory at the next general election. But they did after Longman, Queensland, eight months later, despite the swing to the opposition being a smaller 3.7 per cent (assisted in this case by a new personal vote for Labor MP Susan Lamb, who had been elected in 2016). Longman set the hares running — apply that 3.7 per cent to seats across the board, and woaaah! — and resulted in prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s demise two months later.

But the truth is that by-elections can rarely tell us anything about a party’s prospects at the next general election, precisely because voters aren’t (except in rare cases, in a hung parliament) deciding who should form government. This frees them up to vote for other reasons.

And folks should never ever plot a by-election swing onto the pendulum. Yes, it’s tempting, but don’t do it! Yet virtually everyone in politics is convinced, or pretends to believe, that by-elections are dry runs for the big event. Perhaps we got this unfortunate habit from the Brits.

This takes us to Eden-Monaro, where voters will cast their ballots on 4 July to select Mike Kelly’s replacement. Five weeks ago I ventured that, “factoring in the likelihood of a strong [Liberal] candidate,” the government would probably retain the seat.

That strong candidate (an Andrew Constance or a Jim Molan; I didn’t mention state Nationals leader John Barilaro, but he would have fitted the bill) didn’t eventuate, and instead they’re running Fiona Kotvojs, who also contested in 2019. (Not that she’s a bad candidate, but she doesn’t possess star power.)

Labor, by contrast, seems to have wrung maximum bang out of its buck with the mayor of Bega Valley Shire, Kristy McBain. She is reported to have enjoyed a profile boost during the summer bushfires (though not as much as Constance), and around a fifth of Eden-Monaro’s voters live in her jurisdiction. (And for all I know her recognition might extend well beyond the council boundaries.)

The key theme of that earlier article was that Kelly’s popularity, and hence his high personal vote, made the seat appear more Labor-friendly than it actually is. Redistributions over the last decade and more have favoured the Liberals, and Kelly’s presence on the ballot paper at all of the last five outings (even in 2013, when he was unsuccessful) disguised this reality.

Put it this way: if Kelly had retired at the last election, Kotvojs (if she had been candidate) would now be the MP. If he’d waited and retired at the 2022 general poll, the Liberals would probably retake it, unless Labor has a particularly good New South Wales result (like 2007, say, or 1993).

But this is a by-election, and by-elections are unpredictable, though they usually swing against governments. Even if we take away 5 per cent for the loss of Kelly’s personal vote, just a Bennelong-sized swing would get Labor over the line.

So, in the absence of that turbocharged candidate, I’m withdrawing the earlier prediction and climbing onto the fence. It could go either way.

From McBain’s point of view, the chances of entering federal parliament next month are better than if Kelly had delayed retiring until 2022. And if she does win, it will increase her chances at the next election because she’ll have almost two years to consolidate her personal vote and employ the resources of incumbency. Defending a seat is easier than trying to take it.

What issue could Labor urge Eden-Monaro voters to “send a message” to the government about on 4 July? At time of writing, industrial relations potentially holds promise.

Needless to say, Anthony Albanese has more to lose from Eden-Monaro than Scott Morrison, because seats usually swing to oppositions at by-elections, don’t they?

A Liberal win wouldn’t tell us anything about the next general election, but lots of political players will believe it does, and others, Albo’s internal enemies, will pretend to. •

And if you want to dig in a bit deeper, see this graph of votes at groups of Eden-Monaro booths over the past sixteen years.

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Forty-five years later, it seems worthwhile to reflect on those three interviews in particular, aided by notes I took at the time and later revelations about some of the contentious matters I raised with the three men.

At the time of our conversation, it had been six months since Hasluck had completed his term as governor-general; his public life was effectively over. Gorton and McMahon were still MPs, by contrast, having remained in parliament after losing office; each was seeking (with minimal success) to retain some influence in Liberal Party and national affairs. All other things being equal, one might have expected Hasluck, the private citizen, to have fewer inhibitions.

Of course, all other things are rarely equal, and any hope of startling revelations from Hasluck was tempered by an understanding that he was an old-school conservative, with a media image as colourless and bland, committed to principles of discretion and restraint, and unlikely to have undergone a personality change after leaving office. During his parliamentary career he had been renowned for his disdain for the plotting, scheming and deal-making of his trade: indeed that “failing” was said to have contributed to his loss to Gorton in the Liberal leadership contest after Holt’s death in December 1967.

It had not been my plan to fill the thesis with quotes from MPs, but where I did wish to cite an interviewee’s comment I undertook to provide him with the context of the quote and seek his written approval. (Yes, they were all men.) Hasluck, however, pre-empted this plan when he wrote agreeing to meet me, making clear that he was “willing to have a conversation… but not willing to have any of our conversation recorded or to be quoted as a source of information.”

In fact, he went further, expressing his lack of sympathy for any excessive dependence on interview-based research. He was “appalled by the quick books on current affairs by journalists,” he wrote, “where backroom gossip and speculation becomes accepted and quoted in academic studies as being ‘history.’” Given that Hasluck had been (among other things) a journalist and a historian before entering parliament, this was heavy stuff. He was to be my first interview and it was dawning on me that I might have been better served starting off with a lowly backbencher.

My apprehension proved misplaced when we met in Perth in January 1975. In person, Hasluck was immensely courteous, not remotely combative, engaging, informative and expansive. It was an early lesson for me about the limited value of media images. In two separate parts of the interview, he was critical of Holt’s dependence on “public relations men” and associated “gimmicks” — an obvious reference to Holt’s press secretary Tony Eggleton — viewing this as the start of the (regrettable) Americanisation of Australian politics.

Hasluck had been external affairs minister under Holt, and during the interview he referred to what he clearly saw as his leader’s excessive faith in personal contacts and tendency to exaggerate the advantages of being on first name terms with heads of government. As Hasluck saw it, the department did the “real” work of foreign policy.

He believed that Holt was secure in the party leadership and would have survived any challenge, although critics might have discounted this confidence in the light of Hasluck’s relative detachment from internal party intrigues.

More surprising for me was his reference to the problems treasurer William McMahon was creating for Holt by “spreading rumours and lies.” Obviously, Hasluck had never gone on the public record with such criticism of McMahon, and telling me didn’t change that. Nor would he have conveyed such a view to any members of that species he despised — the press.

“Party trick”: cartoonist Bruce Petty’s depiction of William McMahon’s destructive capacity.

In later years, however, the public could access his anti-McMahon views in considerable detail, notably in The Chance of Politics, a collection of pen portraits of political personalities he had observed during his time in Canberra, which was published by his son Nicholas after his death. Among the words he used to describe McMahon — a “contemptible creature” — were disloyal, devious, dishonest, untrustworthy, petty and cowardly. Similar scathing observations about his former colleague can be found in Hasluck’s notes from his term as governor-general, held in the Australian National Archives.

The contrast with that rugged, idiosyncratic individualist John Gorton could hardly have been greater. In Gorton’s first interview with me, in Canberra in May 1975, the then Liberal backbencher was critical of Holt for his handing of the Voyager affair and the VIP aircraft affair — two scandals that had caused the government much embarrassment — and especially for his failure to discipline party rebels who made trouble over the Voyager. Not surprisingly, he denied any involvement in discussions to replace Holt as PM, but the denial is credible. Without the lower house vacancy ultimately created by Holt’s death, there was no obvious transition route for a Senate leader to change houses in order to become PM.

Gorton did advise me that Liberal Party whip Dudley Irwin had consulted him over the letter, sent to Holt just before his death, that sought a discussion about concerns that the government had not been performing very well for some time. It would not seem unusual for Gorton, as government Senate leader, to have been consulted. While contending that any challenge to Holt would have been unsuccessful, he could not resist the temptation to suggest that McMahon may have been involved in efforts to undermine his leader.

An opportunity arose in October 1976 for a further discussion with Gorton, now a private citizen following his unsuccessful attempt to win an ACT Senate seat at the 1975 federal election. He took up a very brief appointment as a visiting fellow in the Department of Government at the University of Queensland, where I was then located. In a short second interview, two points stood out.

First, Gorton recalled the story of how former prime minister Robert Menzies summoned McMahon after the leaking of cabinet documents, forced him to sign a confession and threatened him with dismissal if he committed further offences. I am unsure as to how widely known this story was at the time of Gorton’s telling, but it has featured in later accounts of the era, including in Patrick Mullins’s biography of McMahon.

Apparently, Holt didn’t “inherit” the commitment. Gorton claimed that McMahon resumed his leaking habits, which mostly related to an ongoing policy (and personality) war with Country Party leader and deputy PM John McEwen. McEwen attacked McMahon at several cabinet meetings, reflecting the toxic relationship that would see McEwen veto McMahon from succeeding Holt.

On Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War, Gorton claimed that the cabinet consensus lasted until Holt’s final decision (in late 1967) to send more troops. At that meeting, Gorton voiced lone dissent, feeling that Australia had “done enough” and that the United States was “half-hearted” in its war effort. Not quite hawk turning dove, it was nevertheless indicative of the approach Gorton would take as PM: the Australian commitment was not increased on his watch.

Interesting as this conversation was, much more colour attended the lunch held in Gorton’s honour during his visit to our department. There was plenty to eat and drink, and the former PM held little back as he offered (inter alia) a keen analysis of McMahon’s personality failings. It might be observed that some of the language used was not quite consistent with scholarly norms.

Knowing that I would be in Canberra a few weeks later, Gorton generously invited me for drinks with himself and his wife Bettina at his Red Hill home. The visit called for best behaviour and I made no attempt to outdrink Australia’s nineteenth prime minister.

A major purpose of that Canberra visit was an interview with McMahon, a backbencher since his election loss in 1972, with nearly another decade to serve in that role. At the time we met, progress figures from the 1976 US presidential election (in which Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford) were coming through and McMahon was following the result on a small transistor radio. Turning his attention in my direction, he made a point common to several interviewees — that Holt was more concerned with the politics of policy-making than Menzies had been. He also noted that there were more aggressive exchanges at Holt’s cabinet meetings than had been the case under Menzies. Specifically, his nemesis McEwen “went to more extreme ends.” This was probably a reference to the Country Party leader’s criticism of McMahon’s leaking. McMahon told me that he regarded McEwen “as a psychiatric case.” Now, that would have been worth leaking — by me!

On Holt’s leadership, McMahon claimed that there had been discussions, but that he was oblivious to them because his role as treasurer was “very demanding.” It was not for me then, or now, to characterise this as a blatant lie, but I suspect that any Canberra journalist sitting in on our chat might have burst out laughing. McMahon did make the point that Gorton’s supporters seemed suspiciously well-prepared when Holt suddenly died.

It was obviously a rewarding experience to be able to interview a range of political figures, even if most of what I gathered provided background and context rather than revelations to be quoted in my thesis, and the relevant cabinet papers were decades away. The three men had been major players during that fascinating time when the predictability of the Menzies era gave way to a period of sustained instability within the Liberal Party. •

The post After Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

Back then, Scott Morrison and his team ran a disciplined, hip-pocket-focused campaign. For the very opposite, go back to Labor’s 2013 re-election attempt, when Kevin Rudd tried again and again, with on-the-run policymaking, to get a “boost” in the polls that would carry through to election day.

Desperate prime ministers can be tempted to do this kind of thing. John Howard did it in 2007 with his Northern Territory intervention and, twice, by targeting Sudanese refugees.

But last year’s more successful effort was focused on the fundamental equation: the decision voters make at the ballot box. And the message Morrison and his colleagues hammered home was that they were the safer alternative.

After 18 May 2019, Morrison was God — even better, to some, he was Howard reincarnated. But the more apt comparison is with Paul Keating in 1993. A surprise win transformed Keating into the unbeatable master of caucus — until his comeuppance five months later after a budget no one liked. (Hiking indirect taxes after an election dominated by your opposition to a GST can do that.) Last year Morrison enjoyed seven months of sunshine before an unwise holiday in the Pacific followed by several blundered attempts to reset his public persona.

But that’s all forgotten now. He’s riding high, as are the state and territory leaders. It’s a respite from a long, steady depletion of trust in political parties and governments, assisted by sluggish economies. But while the coronavirus will linger, our leaders’ heightened stature can’t.

The latest federal Newspoll, roughly in line with other surveys, has the prime minister’s personal ratings still very high, with voting-intention figures putting the Coalition on 43 per cent and Labor on 35. If this were Britain or Canada, with first-past-the-post voting, such figures would point to a landslide win for the government. As it is, estimated preference flows put the Coalition just ahead, 51–49, because around 80 per cent of Greens support (which is 10 per cent in this poll) will end up in Labor’s two-party-preferred pile.

What do polls like this mean? Very little. Given Morrison’s personal ratings, it’s interesting that the government isn’t further ahead. But the “if an election were held today” scenario is even more ludicrous than usual. We’re in a crisis and political attitudes are on hold.

Overall, the 2022 election result remains as it was last year: unpredictable, but with Labor the likely victors. Re-election is difficult for nine-year-old governments. The economy wasn’t great before the current crisis, which has added to the likelihood of the unexpected (and unforeseeable), in any direction.

The biggest potential strain lies within the Coalition. If it were in opposition it could complain about Labor’s reckless spending, but governing bestows certain responsibilities. Still, a substantial section of the government’s support base is grumpy about the measures taken, partly because they have internalised the propaganda about the Rudd government’s response to the global financial crisis: you can’t spend your way out of trouble. Now this centre-right government is doing the same, but on steroids. There’s also the related backlash against the health restrictions, which often veers into voodoo analysis, mixing up cause and effect (namely, “all these restrictions and for what, just a few deaths?”).

Naturally enough, the rushed-out spending has its anomalies. If Labor were in power we would have a good idea how it would play out politically in coming years (not well for them) but the electorate gives the Coalition more leeway on fiscal behaviour.

Which brings us back to the friendly fire. For the time being, Morrison’s heightened community standing inoculates him against internal mischief. But that’ll be gone soon enough, probably by the end of the year.

Then intra-party machinations might get interesting again. •

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Speaking to Barrie Cassidy on the ABC’s Insiders, Sinodinos ventured that “a returned government with Malcolm Turnbull at its head… will have the capacity to stamp its authority on all sorts of issues and I think people in the party will respect that.”

Cassidy: “So he’ll have a stronger mandate?”

Sinodinos: “I believe so.”

Conservatives in the party room and the wider movement interpreted this as a prediction that their time in the sun, facilitated by Tony Abbott’s seven-year leadership from late 2009, was coming to an end. They didn’t react well.

Which “issues” did Arthur have in mind? Well, anything that Turnbull had been forced to forswear to get that party-room majority. The most obvious was serious action on climate change, but the list possibly included a free vote on same-sex marriage, and more generally a government like the one across the ditch led by his mentor John Key: moderate, sensible centre-right, the kind they usually get in New South Wales.

Four months later the Coalition was returned to government, but only just. In fact, a hung parliament looked likely on election night, and friendly fire, including calls for his head, began pounding Turnbull. He never recovered.

What are the ingredients of a leader’s authority within a party? Election runs on the board — the perception of electoral indispensability or at least prowess — must rank one, two and three. Recall Malcolm Fraser after his two massive wins in 1975 and 1977; Bob Hawke for his first few, and Paul Keating after the 1993 election, which most had expected Labor to lose. Or John Howard for a year or so after taking office in 1996, before he lost his mojo for a few years; and then again from November 2001, re-elected after appearing a lost cause, and remaining The Man right through to his demise six years later.

Kevin Rudd enjoyed the elixir over 2008 and 2009, while Julia Gillard’s 2010 honeymoon lasted just a few weeks. Tony Abbott reached something approaching colossus status for about a year after his big 2013 victory.

There’s more to job security than that, of course; the smart leaders also massage backbenchers, keeping the troops happy, something Rudd found beneath him. But when your party room believes only you could have brought it into office, or kept it there, that silences the doubters and keeps opponents in their boxes.

On 18 May last year, Scott Morrison pulled a reverse Turnbull, turning an anticipated loss into a glorious re-election. It doesn’t get any better than that: it’s 1993 all over again.

And until very late last year, Morrison was king among Coalition MPs. Is it unfair to suggest he never invested that capital, never tried to drag the government out of its comfort zone? Constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians could be an exception: he has been more open-minded than his ill-tempered predecessor, but that’s a very low base.

But on that perennial Coalition ideological tic, climate policy, he hasn’t even tried. Turnbull at least continued to push. Maybe Morrison is not personally inclined and has been happy to kick the can down the road. Or perhaps he underestimated his own strength and reckoned that a holding pattern — rather than relapsing into Abbott-era wink-wink denialism — was itself an achievement. And maybe it wasn’t an underestimation, and he was right.

Still, if he had given his joint party room a serious talking to, and forced his MPs to do more, the summer’s fire catastrophe would have provided a measure of personal vindication.

As it is, after a brief Christmas hiatus from muscular scepticism, with even deputy prime minister Michael McCormack conceding “absolutely” that more must be done to tackle climate change, the monster is back. Nationals sceptics are out again and proud, demanding that more, not less, coal must be set ablaze. The new resources minister has rolled out the chestnut that he accepts the science but “the climate has always changed,” as if that’s supposed to provide comfort.

Barnaby Joyce, commencing the standard two-round demolition of his leader, is barely bothering to hide plans to finish him off, rolling his eyes at McCormack in parliament.

It’s no surprise that the rebellion inside the junior party coincides with Morrison’s much-diminished stature. The terrible summer created the environment — though, irony of ironies, it threatens to drag the government further to the right on climate change.

So here we go again? Another shrivelled prime ministership, the latest in the eleven-year series since the onset of the global financial crisis? Is it just a matter of time before Peter Dutton strikes again (and the party baulks at him again and chooses a compromise candidate)?

Morrison will always have 18 May 2019, and the “he knows how to win an election” meme will keep him secure. But only up to a point. Nothing is certain — except that he’s wasted his opportunity to put his stamp on the government. •

The post Walking wounded appeared first on Inside Story.

This is not to question programs designed to give more Australians access to good-quality sporting facilities and encourage them to participate in physical activity. Even hard-nosed Treasury economists acknowledge that money spent supporting physical activity saves money down the line by reducing heart disease, diabetes and other lifestyle-related conditions.

Those economists also know that while the market may be able to fund elite sports, there is no way that the Wilcannia Football Club can sell tickets to spectators to see its games or that the Victor Harbor Bowls Club can sell TV rights to its tournaments. These cases of what economists call “market failure” justify public funding.

But why should the Commonwealth, rather than state or local governments, be involved in such a program? After all, section 51 of the Constitution — the part that spells out the powers of the Commonwealth — makes no mention of sport.

Of course, we are not rigidly bound by a document drafted 130 years ago. Many areas of necessary cooperation have been achieved through referral of powers by the states (as allowed by section 51) or by negotiated agreements between the Commonwealth and the states. For example, until Commonwealth and state officials got together in the 1980s to address emergency management issues, different states had incompatible standards for fire hose couplings: it’s fortunate that we sorted that one out.

When it comes to community sports, however, it is hard to find any need for harmonisation or standardisation that may dictate Commonwealth involvement. It is indeed a problem that different states have different rail gauges, but it doesn’t matter that they have different football codes. Surely funding of swimming pools, ovals and so on should be the task of state and local governments, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity.

So how did we get to this point of such Commonwealth involvement, particularly under conservative Coalition governments that have traditionally stood on a platform of “states’ rights”? Why, in 2018, did a federal Coalition government establish this Community Sport Infrastructure Grant, or CSIG, program when there were so many other calls on public revenue and when it was supposedly bound by a commitment to small government?

A pragmatist will answer that question by reference to the difficult financial conditions experienced by state and local governments. In a tough fiscal environment, state governments have to prioritise vital services — school education, hospitals, policing and transport, leaving community sport well down on their list of priorities. The Commonwealth has easier access to funds, so it makes sense for it to take on funding community sport.

The problem in that justification is that it takes the present distribution of funding between tiers of government as an immutable condition. It ignores the reality that state and local governments, whose responsibilities are largely for services employing skilled labour, should have a better financial deal. Just to sustain a given level of service, their revenue base should be a growing share of GDP — a reality the Coalition refuses to recognise.

A political analyst — a hardened cynic in the Canberra press gallery perhaps — would consider the question about Commonwealth involvement to be naive. All governments like to be seen doing something, and programs that have a regional component are all the better because they can be shaped to yield electoral benefits. A pork barrel is one of the trophies of office.

That’s the “obvious” conventional political wisdom. When checked against reality, however, it doesn’t stack up. Academic studies of the effects of regional boondoggles show that they’re usually neutral in terms of electoral outcomes. While electors like an upgraded road, a refurbished stadium or a new cycle path, their liking is not accompanied by gratitude. Rather it’s the satisfaction of an exchange — they have paid their taxes and are getting public goods in return. It’s the same transactional relationship we may have with our local supermarket or hairdresser.

Specifically in relation to the CSIG grants, William Bowe (keeper of the Poll Bludger site) has found that in spite of its politically targeted outlays, it had no net effect on the Coalition vote in the 2019 election. (By now the program would be yielding net political costs.)

Even if it doesn’t pay much attention to research, one may wonder how, in designing the CSIG program, the Coalition hadn’t learned from the Ros Kelly whiteboard affair, which contributed to the defeat of the Keating government, or from the problems the Rudd government had with its home insulation program (which involved poor administration rather than political interference). In both cases the government would have been far better off politically had it handed the money to the states as tied grants, acknowledging that the Commonwealth just isn’t equipped to administer such programs.

Perhaps, in failing to learn from these cases, the Coalition was so blinded by a belief in its own competence that it believed it could succeed where Labor had failed. That’s plausible, but there is also another possible explanation: the Coalition doesn’t really have any firm principles guiding the way public money is spent, because it sees all public expenditure as wasteful. For its part the Liberal Party, in its statement of beliefs, is explicit: “businesses and individuals — not government — are the true creators of wealth and employment.”

If you believe that nothing of value comes from the public sector, it doesn’t matter how public money is spent. A grant to a gun club, a new railway, Medicare… it’s all waste, and may as well be spent in order to maximise the government’s chances in the next election. Such a view of public expenditure underpins the political economy theory known as “public choice,” a theory that arose in the United States in the late twentieth century and that caught on in Australian universities in the 1980s.

Traditional economic theory sees public expenditure in terms of providing public goods that the market cannot provide or cannot provide so well, but public choice theory sees public expenditure quite differently. Its assumption is that public expenditure is used to appease interest groups — private health insurers who want subsidies, commuters who want a railway, or the Betoota Cricket Club, which wants a change room so the crows and galahs aren’t embarrassed by cricketers’ nakedness. The aim of elected office holders is to spend just enough money appeasing these interest groups, to get them over the line in the next election.

Lending evidence to this interpretation of public administration is Morrison’s handling of McKenzie’s misdemeanours. In requiring the head of his department to inquire whether she breached ministerial standards he is rejecting the Audit Office’s assessment, an assessment based on traditional principles of public expenditure and on laws regarding the separation of ministers from the administrators of statutory bodies. Rather, the question according to Morrison is whether she has breached “ministerial standards,” the standards set by his executive government.

McKenzie’s behaviour has been in line with the standards set by the Coalition, particularly as seen in the behaviour of the prime minister in his nonstop political campaigning. Is it fair that she becomes a scapegoat for the Coalition’s entrenched disregard for the public purpose? • 

This article first appeared in Pearls and Irritations.

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Okay. The New South Wales minister Matt Kean says there are a group of senior Liberals, including federal colleagues, urging your government to adopt stronger climate policies and a commitment not to use the so-called carry-over credits to meet Australia’s emissions commitments. Will you consider those calls?

Mr Morrison could have answered a completely different question. He does that quite a lot. He could have engaged in some mellifluous waffle. God knows, he’s an expert at that. He could even have pointed at a spot just behind Ms Lane’s ear and shouted, “Look out, there’s a spider!”

But he didn’t. He abandoned his usual style of obfuscation and well-rehearsed talking points and started using short, declarative, intelligible sentences. “Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet. Most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was.”

Suddenly a tiny chink appeared in the PM’s public persona. Before our very eyes Daggy Dad in the Baseball Cap had become Angry Dad with a Baseball Bat.

So who is this Matt Kean and how did the mere mention of his name cause the PM to start speaking so uncharacteristically clearly?

Matt Kean is the Liberal member for the NSW electorate of Hornsby and environment minister in that state’s Coalition government. He is a former student politician, naturally, and a former accountant. He is still young — and still young at heart, it seems.

In 2018 he sent some indelicate texts to a female Coalition state MP that his girlfriend at the time thought appropriate to put up on Instagram, thus ending her relationship with Mr Kean. He is now back with an earlier love, who happens to be the woman who introduced him to the Liberal Party. They have just had a baby together and intend to get married.

So, other than having had a child out of wedlock, Matt Kean is pretty much your typical, white bread, Liberal MP.

But there are three further things you need to know about Matt Kean. He believes that climate change is a scientific fact, he is a major player in the moderate faction of the NSW Liberal Party, and his friend, factional ally and boss is premier Gladys Berejiklian.

It seems like ancient history now, but back when houses and lives were being destroyed in the unprecedented bushfires he had been warned about months before, Mr Morrison returned home from his holiday in Hawaii to find the nation in a state of grief, shock and anger. He set about doing what any modern political leader does when faced with a career-threatening crisis: he looked around for someone else to blame.

According to the well-connected political commentator Peter van Onselen, writing in disgust on Twitter in early January, “the inner sanctum of Team Morrison are actively backgrounding media against the NSW Coalition government to try and make sure the PM doesn’t wear the blame for his handling of the fires.”

Remember when the PM tried to run the politically obtuse line that “fires are a state responsibility”? And remember when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported erroneously that the Berejiklian government had rejected offers of further military help from the federal government? Matt Kean remembers; he is, in fact, the NSW government’s point man for matters prime ministerial.

Premier Berejiklian’s revenge is to do her job better than Morrison. And Matt Kean’s job is to put a thumbtack on the great man’s chair when he least expects it.

For the next few months — at least — the PM will be tiptoeing barefoot through a still-smouldering political landscape, desperately trying to find the right words, gestures and ideas to summon up an escape chopper.

Whatever he’s tried so far, it hasn’t worked. He tried to meet some bushfire survivors. He tried making a video extolling his own virtues. He threw the army and lots of cash at the problem and people asked — quite rightly — what else have you got? The recent Newspoll figures were predictably savage.

After doing his bit to make Matt Kean into the sort of Liberal who gets good press on the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald, the PM paused to blow some steam through his nostrils and stamp the ground. Lane enquired pleasantly, “How are you going to deal with this internal angst?”

The prime minister deployed the full weight of his office to splutter: “Well, who are the others? Who are the others, Sabra?” Like he didn’t already know. He has spent decades in the famously vicious factional politics of the NSW branch of the Liberal Party.

And if he can’t remember, then several names had already been thrown about — some by the News Corp journalist Sharri Markson. Whatever you think of Ms Markson, there’s no doubt that people in the Liberal Party tell her stuff. In fact, it was her Sunday evening interview with Matt Kean on Sky that got this ball rolling in the first place.

On Sky, Markson name-checked two members of the moderate faction of the NSW Liberal Party, Trent Zimmerman and Jason Falinski, and the recently elected member for Higgins, Katie Allen, as some “others.” And she offered up the tantalising titbit that they had lobbied treasurer and deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg about the issue in a recent meeting.

The three backbenchers don’t pose much of a threat to Morrison, but the mention of the treasurer’s name is gold. Equally ominous could be the fact that the new Tasmanian premier, Peter Gutwein, elected unopposed on Monday, immediately told journalists that “we must do more” about climate change. A couple of days later, Victorian Liberal leader Michael O’Brien was lamenting the lack of a sensible national policy.

The prime minister is currently involved in the tricky task of overhauling the federal Coalition’s policy on climate change. He wants to become the PM for Hazard Reduction, the Scourge of Arsonists Everywhere, but he doesn’t — can’t — won’t — advocate for tougher policies to drive down Australia’s carbon emissions. For that purpose, he offers hopes, prayers and accounting tricks; and he’s obviously getting pushback from inside his own party.

While he’s trying to achieve this delicate task of bomb disposal, his energy and emissions reduction minister, the egregious Angus Taylor, is busy helping the police with their enquiries, as they say, and his former sports minister, the Nationals’ Bridget McKenzie, is doing a pretty good impression of a woman sinking slowly into a muddy paddock.

No wonder the prime minister started talking plain English during a live radio interview with the national broadcaster.

Parliament is back on 4 February. The next Newspoll is due within a fortnight. Summer has another six weeks to go. •

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Following his easy victory five months ago, these might seem surprising questions. After a high-profile battle with Labor’s Ali French, and with the opposition and GetUp! throwing all their kitchen sinks at him, Dutton secured a 3 per cent swing to retain the seat with a healthy 4.6 per cent margin.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Age’s Peter Hartcher certainly believes it was a triumph for the incumbent, devoting a chunk of a recent article to agreeing that GetUp! was Dutton’s secret weapon in May.

Now, I’m quite a GetUp! sceptic. A report in March that a “series of powerful political campaigns” featuring GetUp! and unions would be targeting far-right Fraser Anning in the upcoming election sent a shiver down my spine. Exposure like that was exactly what the little-known senator craved. (In the end, despite their assistance, he got only 1.3 per cent of the vote and didn’t come close to getting a seat.)

In fact, I’m generally doubtful of claims made on behalf of on-the-ground campaigns, particularly by the parties. Somehow it always turns out that the winner ran a sublime campaign and the loser couldn’t organise a proverbial in a brewery.

But, for whatever reason, Dickson actually did underperform for the Coalition at this year’s election. The seat swung to the Coalition by less than the statewide figure of 4.3 per cent, and by less than all but one of the electorates it shares borders with. Blair swung to the Coalition by 6.9 per cent, Lilley by 5.0, Longman by 4.1 and Petrie by 6.8. The fifth, Brisbane, moved to Labor by 1.1 per cent. And that was the second relatively poor result in a row for Dutton, after a big fat 5.1 per cent shift to Labor in 2016 (compared with a Queensland swing of 2.9 per cent the same way).

And, remember, GetUp! was involved in the 2016 Dickson campaign as well.

The upshot is that Dutton’s two-party-preferred vote is now 54.6 per cent, against his party’s whopping state share of 58.4 per cent. On paper he’s safe as long as the Queensland vote remains sky-high, but a uniform swing in the state of 4.3 per cent, which would still leave the Coalition on a healthy statewide vote of 54.1, would see the minister out on his ear.

Those relative seat and state votes are illustrated by the tweeted graph below, which compares the Coalition two-party-preferred votes in Dickson and Queensland since the electorate was created in 1993. The former Queensland copper won it from Labor’s Cheryl Kernot in 2001, after which the lines converged; that improvement in the solid line relative to the dotted one is what we’d expect as a new member becomes known in the electorate and generates a personal vote. But the lines diverged again after 2013.

Another way to get a handle on how an MP is travelling in his or her electorate is to subtract a party’s Senate vote from the House vote in that electorate to give an approximate measure of an MP’s relative personal vote. A very popular local MP — someone a significant number vote for despite not supporting the party — would register a big gap. This table shows that calculation for all sitting Queensland LNP members in 2019. Dutton sits third from the bottom.

This measure has the drawback of depending partly on which minor parties and independents are running. But it adds to the evidence suggesting Dutton did poorly in May.

There are several possible explanations for these two recent below-par performances. One is that Dutton has simply become unpopular in Dickson; perhaps his energetic narrowcasting to the Coalition base is a turn-off for the broader constituency. Another is that (leaving aside redistributions, which are accounted for in the graph) the demographics of the electorate have changed and it is no longer as reliably Coalition-leaning as it was. That would explain the graph movement, but not the personal votes table. Either hypothesis, if valid, would not bode well for his future chances of success.

The cheerier scenario for him is that, despite his and Hartcher’s chortling, there were special circumstances in 2016 and 2019, namely that Labor (and, yes, maybe GetUp!) ran good campaigns and/or the Coalition ran bad ones. In 2016 the candidate was former high-profile state minister Linda Lavarch; she would have brought a personal vote. Lavarch ran for preselection this time but missed out to Ali France, who made a big media splash and was assisted by oafish comments from the sitting member.

This matters, because if these explanations were one-offs they won’t necessarily apply at future outings. By 2022 Dutton might have become more skilful at differentiating rabid Sky News consumers from semi-engaged voters. But Labor would be wise to run France again in 2022, if she’ll do it. If not her, then Lavarch.

But wait, help is also on the way for Peter from an unexpected quarter. In June I wrote about Labor’s bold but disastrous strategy of taking the fight up to the government on “border protection,” with the swashbuckling shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally determined to drag the issue back onto the front pages. Under Bill Shorten and his lethargic immigration shadow minister it was pretty much a non-issue, and whenever Dutton and the government attempted to whip up emotion it looked gratuitous, obvious — and nasty.

Only this week Keneally has tweeted that “airplane people” are “taking jobs away from Australians.” You see what she did there — two can play this game, Peter!

Ultimately this will assist the government. After all, when push comes to shove, who are you going to trust to keep those awful foreigners out?

And with his opposite number adopting his inflammatory language, it humanises Dutton. Perhaps he’s not so horrible after all. So add Keneally’s appointment to the positive side of the ledger for his re-election chances. •

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All prime ministers need to engage in agenda management and spin control, both to govern effectively and to maintain the political advantage. Increasingly though, politicking has been taking priority over governing, and Morrison’s prime ministership promises to be the apotheosis of this trend. Here are four strategies from the Morrison playbook.

Provoking fruitful confrontations

When Labor was fumbling for new directions after its election loss, talk turned to whether Anthony Albanese would try to narrow the differences between the opposition and the government. But any attempt to lower the partisan temperature was bound to fail for the simple reason that the government has a clear interest in magnifying differences rather than conceding similarities. Even if Labor agreed with all the Coalition’s policies except one, the prime minister would cast that remaining point of difference as “a test for Labor,” if not the makings of a national cataclysm.

We usually think of oppositions seeking to embarrass governments, but governments pursue oppositions with just as much zeal, keen to demonstrate to the public that they are irredeemably unelectable. All the evidence suggests that the search for opportunities like these will be a prominent feature of the Morrison government.

Secondary players have already become targets. Last month, Morrison launched an attack on GetUp!, accusing it of bullying Coalition candidates, lacking accountability and promoting the cause of Labor and the Greens. If the activist group wanted to be involved in politics, he said, it should set itself up as a political party. In fact, GetUp! is already registered as a “political campaigner” under the Electoral Act, and is subject to extensive regulation. The Australian Electoral Commission has inquired into its role and status on three occasions — most recently earlier this year — and in each case concluded the group was not associated with a political party. But no inquiry is likely to stop the Coalition seeking to portray GetUp! and its criticism of the government as illegitimate.

Unions — as always — are another target. After the election the government introduced the Ensuring Integrity Bill, designed — according to the Australian’s Ewin Hannan — “to give the Coalition more power to deregister unions, disqualify union officials, torpedo union mergers and reduce the multi-million-dollar revenue streams flowing to unions.” In a speech in Perth, Morrison made clear whom the real target was: “Labor can talk about banning John Setka from the ALP, which they still haven’t done. Australians know there’s plenty more union thugs where John Setka came from.” The government will be looking for opportunities not only to discredit unions but also to generate conflict with them, partly to keep Labor off balance and partly to keep the political contest on the government’s preferred terrain.

Morrison and his colleagues will also maintain the heat on national security — defined to include the threat from asylum seekers — which it calculates will create divisions within Labor and appeal to a sympathetic public constituency. Within weeks of the election, the Australian Federal Police took draconian steps to identify public servants who had leaked to the media, its raids clearly designed to draw lines, have a chilling effect on whistleblowers, and cast political dissent as treacherous.

Paradoxically, the government has an interest in cultivating and heightening conflict in order to portray itself as the custodian of national security. Like his political mentor, John Howard, Morrison uses terms like national interest or bipartisanship less out of a concern for security or harmony and more with the aim of wedging Labor.

Creating narrative-reinforcing diversions

Spin doctors know that if you allow a political vacuum to develop, your opponents will fill it. In this era of continuous campaigning and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, no government can dominate media coverage solely with its own decisions and actions; increasingly they use gestures to fill the void. A government like this one, with a very thin policy agenda of its own, will have an even greater need to create diversions.

In August energy minister Angus Taylor announced a parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy, which several backbench MPs had recently been promoting. Not only is there very little prospect of a nuclear power industry emerging in Australia, we also already have plenty of information about its prospects and worldwide decline. Less than a year ago the CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator concluded that nuclear power will be more expensive than all other forms of power generation for decades to come. According to economist John Quiggin, nuclear power would only become economic if a very substantial carbon price were introduced; even then, any nuclear power station would be at least two decades off.

Over the past six years Coalition governments have managed neither to contain electricity costs nor to cut emissions. Nuclear power is not a short- or even medium-term solution to either problem, but it performs the politically useful function of confusing the debate about renewables while painting a picture — plausible to some voters — of a forward-looking government.

The government’s proposed compulsory drug testing and cashless credit cards for welfare recipients are two other examples of diversions used to distract attention from more intractable problems. Newstart recipients who refuse a drug test will have their payments cancelled, and those who test positive will have to complete unspecified “treatment activities.” Drug abusers are a small fraction of the unemployed in general and of Newstart recipients in particular; these measures won’t significantly reduce either group, but they will reinforce narratives about undeserving welfare recipients and a tough government determined to cut down on waste.

Substituting truisms for evidence

Scott Morrison’s ability to project energy and optimism is probably one of the main reasons he won the election. He will continue to seek out opportunities to be cheerleader-in-chief, but inevitably he will also need to defuse difficult moments.

Morrison is a great deflector. He dismisses unwelcome lines of questioning by saying they reflect the arcane interests of people inside the Canberra bubble, that he is concentrating on matters much more important to the Australian people, or — less successfully — that he doesn’t respond to gossip. Interviewers find him hard to pin down. Turnbull engaged with questions, even if on his own terms; Abbott’s evasions were obvious and clumsy; Morrison is more agile.

Morrison is also an Abbott-style simplifier, but more adept at reframing questions to avoid being weighed down by unwelcome facts. “We all know the current system is not working,” he recently remarked about skills training. “The point is getting someone trained with a skill that someone else needs, and that’s the clarity I want to bring to what we plan to do in skills. I’d be happy to invest in skills but I’m not going to invest in dud projects that aren’t working. I’m not going to pour more money into a bottomless pit.”

Evident here is Morrison’s gift for talking about a problem as if it has just arisen. He doesn’t acknowledge what his government has or hasn’t done over the past six years, and he pays no attention to the very considerable policy work and expertise that exists inside and outside government. Rather than look at the evidence, he uses clichés that could apply to almost any government spending at any time.

Discussing the drug testing of Newstart recipients, he does not allow the uncertain evidence of its effectiveness to muddy the narrative. When critics of the scheme focused on its punitiveness and its stigmatising of Newstart recipients, Morrison deftly turned their point on its head: “I am really puzzled by the level of opposition to the government trying to tackle a problem of drug addiction for people who are not in work.”

The shift from considering evidence to reciting truisms is also found in his response to Greta Thunberg’s speech on climate change at the United Nations. Morrison didn’t attempt to argue about the science on global warming. Rather he seized on a study showing many children were anxious about climate change. “You know, I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future,” he said. “And I think it’s important that we give them that confidence, that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, but they’ll also have an economy that they can live in as well. So I think we’ve got to caution against raising the anxieties of children in our country.” Again he prefers noble sentiments, impossible to disagree with, over any consideration of evidence.

Asserting absolutist common sense

Just as he doesn’t like to get bogged down in detail, Scott Morrison is averse to weighing options. He prefers to talk as if no reasonable person could contemplate anything but the course he has embarked on — as if his side is all pro and the alternative is all con, and the choice is between common sense and absurdity. This absolutist rhetoric projects certainty and decisiveness, and aims to close down debate.

He criticises Labor for wanting to increase the Newstart allowance, for instance, denouncing its “unfunded compassion,” without acknowledging that government spending is always a matter of balancing priorities. Whenever questions about welfare or inequality arise, Morrison’s first instinct is to invoke a rhetoric of opportunity and reward: those who have a go will get a go; the best welfare is a job. This fundamentally rosy view — uncomplicated, reassuring, glossing over injustices — avoids confronting messy everyday realities.

Absolutism of this kind is most dramatically on display in the government’s attitude towards asylum seekers. It wants to reverse the medivac legislation, which the crossbench and Labor forced on to the government before the election, even though no adverse effects have become apparent.

Even when their views are clearly at odds with majority opinion, ministers are determined to maintain the hardest of lines. Morrison justified the decision to expel a Tamil family from Biloela, even though the local community wanted them to stay, by saying that the government must pursue the national interest rather than be guided by public sentiment. On other occasions, though, he appears to believe that public sentiment — the views of “quiet Australians” — is a great repository of wisdom.

Getting through the moment

Will the four-pronged playbook keep working?

So far, it has been remarkably effective. But there are no magic formulas in politics, and every approach has its risks. Spin is a self-diminishing resource; today’s success invites tomorrow’s cynicism. Morrison’s concentration is on the quick fix, on getting issues off the public agenda rather than considering substantive solutions. In awkward interviews, he is intent on getting through the moment, hoping that any contrary versions will only catch up later, if at all.

Last month, agriculture minister David Littleproud told parliament that Barnaby Joyce didn’t produce any reports during his period as special drought envoy. An indignant Joyce responded that he had sent many text messages directly to the prime minister. When Scott Morrison was quizzed about this on his return from America, he initially responded to a journalist’s question with: “Well, you said text message, not me, I said he wrote to us, he presented reports.” When told that it was Joyce who had referred to text messages, he immediately pivoted: “Well he did. And Barnaby is a master of all forms of communication. He spoke to me on the phone, he spoke to me in my office, he presented to cabinet, he wrote me letters about this issue, which is what I asked him to do, so it was a pretty comprehensive set of advice that we received it, and I was happy to receive it and it has informed much of what we have done.”

Few people would have felt reassured about the quantity and quality of Joyce’s work after this rhapsodic praise, but Morrison had got through an awkward moment with an upbeat message, and avoided any damaging admissions that might provide future targets.

During the election campaign, the government kept environment minister Melissa Price away from the media, afraid of what mistakes she might make. It was clear that she wouldn’t continue in that position after the election. When confronted, though, Morrison blithely asserted she would stay on as environment minister in the event of an election victory — and got through that moment. After the election, he said she had asked for a new challenge and was moved to the defence industry portfolio. In the after-glow of victory, he got through that moment too.

Much clumsier was his categorical denial that he had used the epithet “Shanghai Sam” to attack Sam Dastyari. Past TV news footage was immediately used to show otherwise. Then he made the excuse that he had misheard the question, which also stretched credibility. In itself, this trivial incident probably did him little damage. But his willingness to say whatever is necessary to get through an awkward moment is fraught with longer-term dangers.

In what may be an interesting indicator of what is to come, Labor has already changed tack on how to handle this tendency. Albanese initially banned his caucus from using the word “liar” when referring to Morrison and his government, but he himself recently charged the prime minister with being “loose with the truth.”

Further and more difficult tests of Morrison’s capacity to determine the agenda and control the spin almost certainly lie ahead. To mollify extremists within its ranks and cater to external constituencies, the government is likely to continue the culture wars.

On the basis of his religious beliefs, Morrison has adopted extremely conservative stances on a range of social issues, including marriage equality, and has chosen not to send his daughters to a public school because of the attitudes they might encounter there. These views are clearly very different from those of most Australians — and the Liberals are convinced that any attacks on his religion would backfire on Labor — but they might nevertheless lead him to act in politically damaging ways. The newly announced parliamentary review of the Family Court, for example, which will be chaired by conservative backbencher Kevin Andrews and One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, is almost certain to arouse passions that could deepen party divisions and highlight the conservatism of its key figures.

Of course, all governments risk fatal damage either from a major scandal or from an embarrassing policy imbroglio. Whether any scandals will gain traction is hard to predict, but it is already clear that global warming is going to be an area of continuing contention for this government. Climate change deniers, still prominent among its members and supporters, got through the election period with some simple but essentially dishonest claims about Australia’s Paris commitments, even though national emissions have not fallen. The knots in which the government ties itself in order to justify its inaction are likely to get ever tighter, and strong, well-informed external critics won’t disappear.

Labor underestimated Morrison’s marketing prowess before the election, and the media have often failed to hold him to account. His playbook may not be subtle, but so far it has been effective. •

The post The Morrison playbook appeared first on Inside Story.

While the business community reacted warmly to the Morrison government’s return in the May election, relations between the corporate sector and the government have been rocky since then, and all indications point to even more turbulent times ahead. This isn’t surprising: the foreshadowed legislation to allow forced divestment of energy-company assets is without precedent in the history of corporate regulation in Australia and is sending shockwaves through not just the energy sector but the corporate sector as a whole.

Business must wonder who its friends are in Canberra. There was both dismay and astonishment at resources minister Matt Canavan’s attacks on the banks for their reluctance to finance Adani’s controversial coal development in Queensland, and many corporate leaders were taken aback by conservative Peter Dutton’s blunt “butt out” comments after widespread corporate support for same-sex marriage. Ministerial attacks on business leaders who take progressive positions on social issues sit most uneasily with the party’s traditional defence of free expression.

In the pre–Liberal Party days before the second world war, big business effectively had its own party — the Liberals’ non-Labor predecessor, the United Australia Party. The UAP had been hastily cobbled together in the wake of the defeat of the Nationalist government of Stanley Melbourne Bruce in 1929 and the defection of several Labor figures from the government of James Scullin in 1932.

While the parliamentary UAP was led by prime minister Joseph Lyons, one of the Labor defectors, the party itself was more or less controlled by a cabal of mostly Melbourne-based business leaders. They raised the funding, selected the candidates and dictated policy. Partly as a result, the UAP was derided by its critics as being anything but united, more concerned with protecting British than Australian interests, and less a party than a front organisation financed and directed by business interests. All these points contained at least a modicum of truth.

The party’s shortcomings were clearly recognised by one of its subsequent leaders, Robert Menzies, who became prime minister in 1939 after Lyons’s death. Forced out of office by his colleagues in 1941, Menzies would draw on his experiences in the UAP when he helped found a new non-Labor party, the Liberal Party. Menzies proclaimed that the new party was beholden to no vested interests — a tactical swipe both at the Labor Party, with its trade union links, and at the old, discredited UAP, seen by many Australians as having failed to deal with the misery of the Great Depression while looking after its own interests.

Menzies insisted that the Liberal Party would raise its own funds to secure its operational and political independence — a move that was most fiercely resisted in Sydney. With the Great Depression still fresh in his mind, he was acutely aware that big business, left to its own devices, would act in ways not always compatible with a democratic society. In his memoir Afternoon Light, Menzies explicitly rejected the notion that private enterprise should have an “open go,” arguing that the state quite properly had a role in enacting social legislation and providing for economic security. In fact, Menzies the lawyer and Menzies the politician often looked askance at business, seeing it as just another interest group, albeit an important one.

Even in the very early days of the Liberal Party, tensions were evident between Menzies and big business. Menzies clashed with the first national president of the party, T.M. (later Sir Malcolm) Ritchie, over plans to raise funds from the business sector, with Menzies labelling Ritchie and his close associates as “not politics conscious.” Ritchie hit back, declaring that he, not Menzies and not the parliamentary party, was more in touch with public opinion.

When Menzies achieved a sweeping victory in 1949, largely over the damaging fallout from Labor’s thwarted scheme to nationalise the private banks, the business community relaxed a little, comfortable for the time being that the socialist tiger had been contained. But that was merely a lull, not a truce.

Powerful elements within the party resented Menzies’s commitment to significant government regulation of the economy. A group of largely NSW members constituted what was known as a free-trade “cave” within the parliamentary party, pressing for an end to the two-airlines policy, for instance, and a withdrawal from commercial shipping operations. Backed by Sydney business interests, this group ensured that Menzies would never entirely have his own way on policy issues affecting the corporate sector.

Menzies came within a seat of losing government in 1961, after the disastrous “credit squeeze” budget brought in to address inflation. Business was highly critical of the budget, and some business leaders even wondered aloud if Labor might be a better option. The party’s federal president, Sir William Anderson, accused the government of “insolence of office,” claiming that if it had heeded advice from the organisation it wouldn’t have lost the support of key sections of the business community. He summarised the government’s attitude to the party as “we know best, little people.”

Not long after, the first attempts to legislate on trade practices elicited staunch resistance from sections of the business community, prompting the second serious confrontation between the party organisation and Menzies. Acting on behalf of the business community, the party flexed its muscles decisively when the government unveiled its promised legislation, condemning it as too harsh and far beyond what was necessary. Much debate and protracted negotiation took place, and the version enacted in 1967 — by which time Menzies had retired — was much attenuated.

Memories of the business tail wagging the political dog remained part of Liberal Party culture. In 1970 a young Liberal backbencher, Neil Brown, visited London and called on the high commissioner, Sir Alexander Downer, a former senior Menzies minister and Adelaide conservative grandee. Downer was hungry for political news from home and asked Brown how the embattled prime minister, John Gorton, was faring. On being told that Gorton was in political trouble, he said to Brown, “You must promise me one thing, Mr Brown. Never let the prime ministership fall into vulgar, commercial Sydney hands.”

Gorton was toppled in a party-room coup in 1971 and succeeded by William McMahon, member for the inner-Sydney seat of Lowe, a man widely distrusted in Victoria for what one Liberal described as his “reckless closeness” to Sydney’s business interests. McMahon’s successor after the party’s electoral defeat in 1972, Bill Snedden, another Victorian, was later to remark privately that the Liberals would never again entrust the leadership to a Sydneysider.

After Malcolm Fraser and Andrew Peacock, of course, it did just that. And, with the brief exception of Alexander Downer’s leadership, it has remained in Sydney hands ever since.

It was under John Howard (1996–2007) that business found its true champion. He consistently catered to its needs with policies including the introduction of the GST and changes to workplace laws. On his watch the strident voices of the business lobby, such as the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Institute of Public Affairs, appeared to have merged with the Liberal Party.

Fast forward to the election of Tony Abbott in 2013 and business found chaos where it expected certainty. Few corporate tears were shed when Abbott was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015. A targeted Morgan Poll taken soon after the switch of leaders showed business owners, professionals and managers swinging decisively behind the new leader — with the two-party-preferred Coalition vote recorded at 61.5 per cent (up 12.5 per cent from pre-Turnbull) and the Labor vote at 38.5 per cent. More importantly, confidence among this group of business owners, professionals and managers had increased to 118.6 points (up 5.2 from pre-Turnbull). The pollster also found real business confidence soaring from 102.6 in August to 119.3 in October.

But Turnbull failed to meet business expectations, and dissension within his government failed to deliver what business wanted most — certainty, especially on the crucial energy front.

Scott Morrison, fresh from an election win, has the opportunity to restore relations with business. But the current confrontation suggests this might not happen anytime soon. •

The post With friends like these appeared first on Inside Story.

“Only two factions matter,” he declared, “the smart people and the dills.”

The former prime minister was oh so right, but not in the way he intended, for he was enthusiastically supporting Latham (and presumably didn’t number himself among the dills).

Keating’s remark was like most of the advice he’s offered to the party since leaving politics: more sizzle than sausage, and unhelpful as well. He was a hugely substantial figure in his time, and an eloquent salesman, but the way he characterises his political career, and the lessons he draws from it, tend to be shaped by the requirements of his ego. His recurrent theme, for over two decades now, is that Labor post-1996 has forgotten the lessons he (okay, Bob Hawke too) taught it about building a new constituency and bringing the voters along, that it’s no longer the party of reform — well, you know it by heart.

Missing from Keating’s recollections is the central role of ferocious negativity, of which he was a most effective exponent: those utterly cynical demolitions of opposition policies, many of which he had either advocated in the past or would argue for later.

He has even implicitly scolded Beazley for opposing the Howard government’s GST in 1998, which should go in the dictionary under “chutzpah.” And he never quite gets around to explaining where the huge 1996 defeat fits on the canvas.

Having helped elevate Latham to the top, he reportedly urged the new leader to take an unfunded personal tax cut to the 2004 election. John Howard and Peter Costello wouldn’t know how to respond, he reckoned.

I suspect they might have known exactly how to react. They would have latched onto it with glee. Imagine the fun Costello would have had in parliament. That script writes itself.

But the real problem with that tiresome “be like Hawke and Keating” mantra we’ve all suffered for almost two decades (when did it start, in 2001–02?) is that those two men did what they did in government, not in opposition. Keating hasn’t been part of an opposition leadership team since 1983, when he was a nervous, inexperienced, stop-gap shadow treasurer who mostly left the economic talk to his more knowledgeable boss. Winning from opposition is not something he’s very familiar with.

And much of the memory of that time is shrouded in myth. The political class tends to forget that none of those reforms that commentators still celebrate — floating the dollar, deregulation, tariff reductions, privatisation, etc., etc. — was taken to an election first. Even once it was behind the armoury of government, Labor wasn’t incautious enough to do that.

On 2 December 2003 the dills outnumbered the smart people, just, by forty-seven to forty-five. Sixteen years later, six Latham supporters remain in parliament, four of them — Penny Wong, Joel Fitzgibbon, Catherine King and Brendan O’Connor — on the frontbench. The other two, Maria Vamvakinou and Kim Carr, sit at the back. (Carr was a mover and shaker — on the winning side — of both the 2003 and 2006 contests, but his status as a factional heavy has lapsed.)

And the surviving smart ones? There are just three, all frontbenchers: Anthony Albanese, Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Byrne.

Albanese is now opposition leader, and his record in the 2003 and subsequent leadership stoushes suggests he is smart in that regard, and not susceptible to Latham–Gillard fantasies of muscling up, fighting on values, and recapturing battlers’ hearts and souls. He possibly understands that in a two-party system (albeit an eroding one) softly committed voters choose at least as much on the basis of whom they don’t want to win as whom they do. If the government is on the nose, there are times when the opposition should stand back and let the votes flow to it. Fighting too hard can sometimes muddy the waters.

Does Albanese have what it takes to win the next federal election? The answer is, yes, of course, but…

Here’s a secret: election outcomes are mostly about luck and timing, about being in the right place at the right time. After the victory, let the storytellers construct their narratives and tell their tall tales about how only that leader could have done it.

Scott Morrison ran a good campaign this year, no doubt about it (this is not being smart after the fact; see, for example, this election morning article). Aimed squarely at the middle, it was light on ideology and free of the puerility that he from time to time lets slip. He emphasised the theme that Howard spoke out loud fifteen years ago, but which is usually an unenunciated major driver of federal election results: whom do you trust to run the economy?

Labor, by contrast, seemed fixated on its base, or a part of it, as if victory is achieved by enthusing the true believers so greatly that the passion spills over into a national majority. With all those hits at the “top end of town,” Shorten sounded a lot more “left wing” than was sensible. But most of all the government was unbelievably lucky to face an opposition taking great big policies to the ballot box.

Bill Shorten wasn’t greatly liked by voters, but that didn’t have to matter much. More importantly, he wasn’t trusted. His presentation seemed rehearsed and inarticulate. What was he hiding?

Individually, those characteristics weren’t enough to demolish Labor. It was the ambitious policy agenda combined with Shorten’s persona that created a perfect storm. The two key plans themselves, on negative gearing and franking credits, were fine — overdue reforms in the mould of the sainted Hawke and Keating — but taking them to the ballot box first, and from opposition, was sheer madness.

(Could it really be true that, in private, Keating encouraged Shorten and Chris Bowen along this path? Could he not imagine how he himself would have relished the opportunity to avail himself of such material when he was in government?)

What does it all mean for Labor and its new leader? The expert consensus seems to be that there’s about a fifty–fifty chance of a recession before the next election. Either way, this will be a nine-year-old government by then, not overly blessed with vigour or imagination, never greatly loved, facing a Senate that might be more cooperative than its recent predecessors but is still hard going.

As long as Labor doesn’t do too much dumb stuff, it should be odds-on to take office in 2022. Albanese’s biggest challenge is remaining leader until then. Morrison’s miracle win has elevated him to political maestro status. He can’t be beaten, they’ll say, no matter how bad things get; he’s a fighter, best with his back against the wall, he always comes back. And the spectacular 2019 opinion poll fail will see any Labor leads adjusted down.

Shorten lasted two terms thanks to Kevin Rudd’s 2013 leadership rules. Given how that ended, and how the prime ministerial turnstile proved no barrier to the Coalition’s re-election, many in caucus will conclude that stability at the top is overrated. And Kevin’s rules can be overturned by a party-room vote (or, more likely, the threat of one, with the incumbent being prevailed on to stand down and allow another to run uncontested).

They might even, as in the summer of 2003, decide that the situation is so hopeless, their everyman opponent so clever, that it wouldn’t hurt to try something really stupid.

Albanese, while not without presentational problems, is infinitely more articulate than Shorten, and seems smarter than most of his colleagues when it comes to the dynamics of elections. He’ll no doubt let through to the keeper, with good humour, the occasional strategic advice from a former prime minister.

But he’s in for the fight of his life to still be leader in 2022. •

The post Ghosts of governments past appeared first on Inside Story.

In 2010 Savva published So Greek: Confessions of a Conservative Leftie, a memoir of her life in journalism and politics, and an exercise in name-dropping that would make Greg Sheridan blush. Her bestselling second book, The Road to Ruin (2016), documented the self-destruction of the Abbott government. Who better, then, to write Plots and Prayers, the behind-the-scenes account of Peter Dutton’s half-successful coup against Malcolm Turnbull, and the unlikely triumph of Scott Morrison?

But there is a problem here, as Savva unwittingly reveals when she attempts to explain why she was once certain there would be no follow-up to The Road to Ruin:

To be honest, I never thought the need would arise; I was sure that events would spare me the physical and mental ordeal of trying to reconstruct the destruction of another prime minister. It seemed to me that Malcolm Turnbull would lead the government to the 2019 election, that he would more than likely win it, that afterwards there would be little to say about it, and that by the time he was gone, I would be gone, too.

In Savva’s mind, Malcolm — sensible, intelligent Malcolm — would steady the ship after the turmoil of the Rudd–Gillard–Abbott era, and federal politics would return to the normality of the comfortable and relaxed Howard years.

For all of her insider access and intelligence, that is, Savva was seemingly oblivious to the fact that members of the increasingly radical hard right of the Liberal Party were not merely hostile to Turnbull — they hated him with a burning passion, and they would not rest until they had cast him out of their party for good. Savva is so close to her subjects she is unable to perceive their actions clearly, and thus could not see that Turnbull’s prime ministership was doomed from the beginning.

In her newspaper columns Savva enthusiastically adopted Miranda Devine’s “del-con” (delusional conservative) pejorative to describe the hard-right faction that gathered around Abbott and agitated against Turnbull for the entirety of his reign. We might now need to adopt the term “del-mod” to describe those — like Savva — who still believe that the Liberal Party is the custodian of moderate, small-l liberalism.

But it is not only the moderates — including Turnbull, Julie Bishop, Christopher Pyne and Craig Laundy — whom Savva feels sympathy for. The number of politicians she has convinced to speak on the record, including some of the more dastardly instigators of the putsch, is truly remarkable, and she is reluctant to say a negative word about any of them. Coincidentally or otherwise, her harshest criticisms are saved for those with whom she did not speak, such as Mathias Cormann, Barnaby Joyce, Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin.

For all of the various characters that populate Plots and Prayers, the focus naturally falls on four key players: Turnbull, Dutton, Cormann and Morrison.

Those looking to solve the riddle of Malcolm will find no answers here. Turnbull is a deeply arrogant man known for his explosive anger, yet also a Pollyanna in his outward displays of misplaced cheerfulness. Two days after he lost the nation’s top job, we are told, “Turnbull was philosophical, pleased with his achievements.” Savva feels he had a right to be so, claiming that “he was a good prime minister and a terrible politician.” She provides plenty of evidence for the latter but practically none for the former.

Turnbull’s main antagonist in this story, Peter Dutton, provides a neat summary of the right’s critique of the former prime minister when he tells Savva that “ultimately he was not a Liberal at heart… Malcolm saw the Liberal Party as a vehicle to become prime minister. He was a barrister who could argue the brief for either side.” This didn’t prevent Dutton from serving as one of Turnbull’s most senior ministers for almost three years, but political ambition has got people through much more difficult moral quandaries than this.

Dutton’s conversations with Savva produce some of the book’s strangest material, including the claim that he is not the right-wing ideologue he’s been painted as. “I am no further right than Howard and Costello,” he pleads. “I am not the evangelical here, not out-and-proud on abortion. I voted for gay marriage, and I wasn’t going to bring Tony Abbott back. But you are framed with these things.” Savva was impressed enough with this absurd bit of spin to quote it twice, and she is at pains to portray Dutton as much more likeable than his public persona suggests. His appalling record of racism — from his boycott of the apology to the Stolen Generations to his continued demonisation of non-white asylum seekers — suggests otherwise. “The base loves that stuff,” he explains, to which Savva barely musters a response.

Dutton’s closest ally, Mathias Cormann, comes out of the book no better than he came out of the saga itself, despite Savva’s unwillingness to judge him for his actions. Cormann is an odd figure in Australian politics. Unknown to most and little more than a robotic party man with a funny accent to a few, he is nevertheless widely admired by our political journalists. Savva believes he is the best finance minister since Labor’s Peter Walsh, but chooses not to elaborate. What is now indisputable is that he is disloyal, having pretended to have Turnbull’s back as he quietly supported Dutton’s agitation. Julie Bishop had warned Turnbull that Cormann was “the ultimate seducer and betrayer.” Fatefully, she was not believed.

Thanks to Savva’s reporting, it is also now difficult to dispute the notion that Scott Morrison, despite his desire to be perceived as a cleanskin, must take part of the responsibility for Turnbull’s downfall. He did not openly undermine his leader in the way that Dutton did, but his numbers men were working away behind the scenes to ensure a Morrison victory if and when the insurgents came for Turnbull. Numerous sources claim that a handful of Morrison supporters voted for Dutton when Turnbull first spilled his leadership, ensuring that the tally was large enough to fatally wound the prime minister. Few in Canberra appear to be in any doubt about this, and there are plenty of hints that Morrison’s Machiavellian manoeuvring will not be forgotten by his colleagues, especially those, like Dutton and Cormann, who were not fond of him in the first place.

Savva hedges her bets on Morrison, seemingly unwilling to damage a relationship with such a valuable source. She is uncomfortable with his showy religious displays, and relies on anonymous sources to relate his detachment from policy formulation. “The only thing I have ever known him to show passionate belief in,” says one, “is his opposition to same-sex marriage.” But she’s an easy mark for his spin, as when she describes him on the campaign trail: “Morrison reassured people he would govern from the middle for quiet Australians. As the campaign drew to a close, he ventured that it was not about him — it was about them.” A marketing man through and through, this was his messaging from day one of his prime ministership.

Plots and Prayers is a deeply frustrating read. With some astute editing — eliminating page upon page of repetition, and the numerous run-on sentences filled with irrelevant details — its length could have been reduced by a third. The chronology jumps all over the place without warning, and there is little logic to the structure of the book. Savva also has a penchant for half-clever jokes and phrases that don’t land. The first description of Abbott’s insurgency as a “guerrilla/gorilla campaign” should have been cut. How it escaped the editor’s pen four times is beyond me. And did we really need to have the Barnaby Joyce sex scandal repeatedly referred to as “Barnaby’s doodle”?

But the most infuriating aspect of the book is Savva’s bottomless well of sympathy for some of the most appalling characters in Australian political life. There are a lot of politicians’ tears in this book, mainly from Liberal moderates who feel that a great injustice was done in that wild week in August 2018. Alarmingly, Savva tells us that a few of her interview subjects likened their sessions with her to therapy. Christopher Pyne apparently wept all the way home to Adelaide following the coup. Julie Bishop felt “wounded, humiliated and betrayed.” Both retired from politics, only to accept ethically dubious jobs soon afterwards. How the heart aches for them.

Frankly, none of the characters in this book deserves our sympathy. These are the representatives of a party that locks asylum seekers up in island prisons, has no intention whatsoever of acting on climate change, is positively hostile to Indigenous self-determination, and would rather feather the nests of wealthy retirees and property investors than lift the most disadvantaged out of poverty. Save your tears for someone else. •

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“Without free minds and free spirits, our boasted civic freedom becomes an empty shell,” the party’s founder, Robert Menzies, observed in the mid 1930s. The Liberal Party was still a decade away, but the primacy of the individual and the family, and constraints on the intrusive powers of the state, were a key element of the philosophy he attempted to build into the party.

Not that Menzies was consistent on this point. In one of its first major acts after winning government in 1949, his Liberal–Country Party government announced a ban on the Communist Party and its affiliated organisations and restrictions on the liberties of people declared by the government to be dangerous, or potentially dangerous, communists. As law professor George Winterton later wrote, the new law “potentially restricted the civil liberties of everyone.” It was eventually ruled unconstitutional by the High Court and a referendum seeking to alter the Constitution failed.

While the law is still seen in some quarters as a pragmatic response to the emerging cold war and the fear of communist subversion, a look at history suggests that those espousing liberal principles had long advocated repression to counter the perceived communist threat.

In 1934, for example, attorney-general John Latham sought unsuccessfully to impose bans on the party. Latham was a member of the government of Joseph Lyons’s United Australia Party, a forerunner of today’s Liberal Party. Earlier, in the 1920s, the conservative Nationalist government of Stanley Bruce sought to deport two foreign-born communists, leaders of the seamen’s strike, only to be blocked by the High Court.

The Liberal Party’s freedom-of-the-press credentials are similarly blemished. In the mid 1940s Labor, which had long chafed under hostile newspaper coverage, championed the idea of an independent news service for the ABC, modelled on Britain’s BBC. It was opposed by the Liberal-led opposition. With the advent of television in the 1950s, any hopes of greater media diversity were dashed when the Menzies government awarded the lucrative broadcasting licences to a claque of friendly newspaper proprietors.

After a generation of Coalition rule, the election of a Labor government under Gough Whitlam in 1972 disturbed this cosy world. When former newspaper allies now sometimes took Labor’s side, sections of the Liberal Party reacted with fury, seeing it as akin to apostasy. A federal president of the party, businessman Robert Southey, had his political ambitions dashed with the publication of memos written to prime minister William McMahon calling for certain newspaper editors to be “straightened out.” Similar views expressed last year by the then ABC chair, Justin Milne, were equally damaging.

The shift away from espousing individual freedom has not gone unnoticed within the party itself. In 2009, opposition frontbencher and future attorney-general George Brandis delivered a withering attack on the former government of John Howard, accusing Howard of too often losing sight of a core value of Menzian liberalism: the need to defend, rather than merely weigh in the balance, the rights of the individual.

In his contribution to Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead, a book about the party’s prospects, Brandis argued that Howard was at his “most disappointing” when he allowed his social conservatism to get in the way of the party’s traditional commitment to individual freedom. “A great government though it was,” he wrote, “the Howard government would have been a greater government still if it had been more consistently true to the Liberal Party’s liberal values.”

Howard showed “a conscious preference for social order above personal freedom, for the attitudes of ‘the mainstream’ above the concerns of the marginalised,” Brandis wrote. “Given that the philosophy of the Liberal Party — in particular as articulated by Menzies in the 1940s — is ultimately built upon a belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual, this was a profound shift in emphasis. The principal descriptor of the relationship between the individual and the community became ‘responsibilities,’ not ‘rights.’”

On his resignation from the ministry early last year, Brandis returned to the theme, warning of the challenge that right-wing populism posed to the Liberal Party. He told the Senate that classical liberal values were under “greater challenge than at any time in my memory.” Powerful elements on the right, he said, have “abandoned both liberalism’s concern for the rights of the individual and conservatism’s respect for institutions, in favour of a belligerent, intolerant populism which shows no respect for either the rights of individual citizens or the traditional institutions which protect them.”

Being a liberal in the classic liberal sense, Brandis said, means “respecting the right of people to make choices which we ourselves would not make and of which we may disapprove. It means respecting the right of people to express their opinions, even though others may find those opinions offensive. It means respecting the right of people to practise their religion, even though others may find the tenets of that religion irrational. It means, in a nation of many cultures, respecting the right of people to live according to their culture, even though, to others, that culture may seem alien. It means respecting the right of everyone to marry the person they love, even though others may find their understanding of marriage confronting.”

Those words, spoken so recently, already seem just another distant echo of the founding aims of the Liberal Party. •

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The primary impression is that divisive politics has been punished. Tony Abbott’s fate is emblematic, but we know that a number of those in the Coalition who wantonly tore at the processes of government had much to worry about. (Let’s simply note that Angus Taylor, Greg Hunt and Peter Dutton don’t seem to have had the time to participate in the national campaign.) Labor, remarkably, decided to take up the opportunity created by the Coalition’s own goals by kicking one of its own. Its campaign theme was fairness, but its tax message was intergenerational: one against the other.

Overall, it is fair to say that both major parties need to shed the idea of a “base.” In Australia, it’s irrelevant and in any case a euphemism. Voters have been loosening their loyalty for years in reaction to party identities that have more to do with narrow interests than the concerns of the broad middle. Since the election the prime minister and a number of Labor figures have claimed they embrace that message. They had better.

Voters are entitled to some anxiety about the outlook for themselves and their families. Living standards and expectations have risen to remarkable levels in a few generations, but we now face challenges that have not been evident for more than two decades. Technology and trade have produced great benefits but now threaten job security and stability. Rising global consumption — driven partly by the economic success of a country like China, which is also a source of Australia’s prosperity — has amplified doubts about sustainability. Short-term risks are rising, whether from the contest between the United States and China or from a variety of conflicts that may or may not eventuate, lately in the Middle East.

So when, on election night, the prime minister was laying concrete over the rubble of his government’s recent performance, he confirmed to voters that he understood two things. First, he referred often to the Canberra “bubble”: an unspoken promise to stop the indulgent Game of Thrones–style politics that has for too long characterised the affairs of the nation. Second, he acknowledged that if there was a miracle in this election it was the Coalition’s pulling out of a kamikaze dive and landing back where it began.

Voters pegged back the warriors who had embedded volatility and purposelessness in the Coalition government. For the five weeks up to 19 May, the people who had been prominent in the chaos of Coalition policymaking appear to have been confined to their homes in the hope of minimising the damage of a presumed storm. Scott Morrison was able to go about his campaign with nary a peep of dissent, and even though shambolic behaviour and events persisted — candidates ditched, the odd Barnaby Joyce brain explosion — his campaign gradually took on an unworried, unthreatening composure. Voters gave him a chance by scaring the bejesus out of a number of his belligerents.

Labor started where it had been for a long time: with a leader that the public did not want. On the evidence well established by data and any focus group, Labor’s best strategy would have started by putting Bill Shorten in a cupboard. It didn’t. Yet the knowledge of that handicap was evident everywhere in the campaign: from the fact of his constant appearances with more appealing campaign minders through to his own choice of shirt, emblazoned “Vote 1 Chloe Shorten’s husband,” on voting day.

Labor offset the personality problem with a big policy agenda that might have sounded comforting, but wasn’t. Shadow finance minister Jim Chalmers made the simple point plain when he said, after the election, that it is essential that budget deficits be reined in. Yet the tax plans Labor proposed weren’t cast as insurance against a coming storm — rather, they were taking back “gifts” to superannuants and milking the “top end of town.” The Coalition kamikaze pilots sat back, no doubt in awe, while Labor’s “retiree tax” imploded.

Why did Labor make such basic errors? We have to assume that it comes down to the same problem faced by the Liberals: the base. The organisational power in Labor clearly lies with its union affiliates, and it shows. Shorten campaigned like a salesman for union membership. His policy pitch came across as a grab bag fashioned to an agenda that often sounded like it came directly from the ACTU — not least when it promised wage rises for particular employee groups. Shorten talked a lot and it was often in a dialect peculiar to union-movement debates. He was a walking, talking advertisement for divisive politics.

Two groups of voters sent remarkably clear signals on Saturday. In Warringah, electors told the Liberal Party that they are not part of the base. The base as defined by Tony Abbott was rejected with vigour. Not far away, in Hunter, the once-solid unionists of the coalmines gave Labor a huge kick (as they did in Queensland). The base as defined by the CFMEU walked away from Labor.

The parliament that MPs will go back to will have a familiar composition: a Coalition government with a small majority and a Senate balanced evenly around a crossbench of smaller parties. But all of the participants will have had a lot to digest because the bubble has burst.

We have to hope that some of the encouraging early signs will persist and that sensible people will maintain a focus on mainstream concerns and primary issues. Jim Chalmers is right: the budget must be made more robust and our finances ready for the risks we face. And Arthur Sinodinos is spot-on when he says energy policy must catch up with the reality of what is happening to Australia’s energy industries and match climate policy with community concerns. In both cases there are uncontroversial middle-ground options and, while none would likely suit any of the “base” groupings, the urgency of consensus and action is intensifying.

Consider that just last week the US–China trade negotiations ended with the Chinese pointedly tearing up a 150-page plan and opting to confront the Americans rather than accept domestic law changes. China’s economy is already showing signs of strain and Australia can’t assume that the benefits of China trade will remain as they have been. In the same week came events in the Middle East that might well be precursors to conflicts that, among other things, would threaten the supply of energy through the Straits of Hormuz. At home, the economy is slowing and confidence is falling.

In short, voters appear to be alert to the broad picture and alert to the messages coming from the bubble. They have acted. The question now is: did those inside the bubble get the memo? •

The post For both parties, the lessons of the election are clear appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not hard to see how this came about. Queensland’s regional industries have historically produced farmers, miners and labourers more inclined to vote for the Country Party (and later the Nationals) or Labor than for the Libs. Despite their modest numbers, the Liberals have also been plagued by factionalism, with tensions between progressive Liberals and conservatives loyal to Nationals premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen at the heart of the state Coalition’s disintegration in 1983.

The Liberal Party ceased to exist in Queensland in 2008, of course, when it merged with the National Party to form the Liberal National Party, or LNP. Yet the factionalism lives on, more than a decade later, between and within the two tribes. And the mere mention of Queensland Liberal factionalism still evokes one name above all: Santo Santoro.

Having joined the Queensland Young Liberals in 1977 at the age of twenty-one, the Italian-born Santoro studied arts and economics at the University of Queensland before joining the party’s federal executive in the 1980s. Following stints working for the Queensland Confederation of Industry and, later, Queensland Liberal senator Warwick Parer, he won the safe state seat of Merthyr (later Clayfield) from the Nationals (who had recently been disgraced by the Fitzgerald Inquiry) in 1989.

He went on to hold ministerial and shadow ministerial roles in employment, industrial relations, police and ethnic affairs, and to serve as deputy state party leader between 1992 and 1995. Over time, though, the once-reliable voters of Clayfield turned against him, and he was defeated by Labor’s Liddy Clark in 2001.

If not quite a meteoric rise, the advancement of the uncompromisingly conservative Santoro, something of an ideological “outsider” from Brisbane’s inner north, had been remarkable in a party long dominated by small ‘l’ liberal blue bloods from the leafy western suburbs. The fact that he possessed a canny ability to cultivate support and organise the numbers was clear. As a result, the 1990s had seen the ranks of a certain variety of conservative MP — members of the “Santoro faction” — begin to swell considerably, and numbers further increased in the new century.

After the 2012 landslide victory of LNP leader Campbell Newman — who was aligned with Santoro and recruited from local government by Santoro powerbrokers — the faction came to control the LNP. By this time, Santoro was both a lobbyist and one of four federal Liberal Party vice-presidents — a combined role allowed by federal Liberal rules but not by the Queensland LNP. Despite his reputation as a stellar party fundraiser state LNP figures were angered by Santoro’s internal party ambitions, fearing not only a potential conflict of interest but also a return to 1990s-style factionalism. The fact that Newman’s successor as leader, Tim Nicholls (who had inherited Clayfield), was also a Santoro protégé again underscores the chieftain’s influence despite years away from the public spotlight.

It is, of course, his spectacular exit from the spotlight that explains why Santoro is remembered outside Queensland. Representing the state as a Liberal senator between 2002 and 2007 (having never faced a federal election), he became embroiled in a potential conflict of interest — a failure to disclose shares in a company related to his ministerial portfolio — just as the stumbling Howard government was losing electoral traction. As University of Queensland researcher Chris Salisbury says, “Santoro simply fell foul of Howard’s ministerial standards.” He had to go.

He soon carved out a lucrative niche as a consultant and lobbyist, reportedly charging tens of thousands of dollars for his services. Clients undoubtedly saw value for money in Santoro’s experience and credentials. Indeed, his business website boasts that his “familiarity with leading players in both the public and private sectors, and his broad network of international corporate and government contacts enable him to frame optimal strategic responses to policy and business challenges and opportunities.”

The inference is clear: Santo knows important people; Santo can make things happen.

Even away from politics, he has never been far from controversy. In late 2012, for example, LNP figures referred him to police over allegations he controlled a private trust that “traded in shares and was being used as a ‘clearing house’ for political donations.” Police decided against taking action over what Santoro declared to be a “stitch-up.” Then, in 2014, he was forced to resign as federal Liberal Party vice-president under new rules that excluded lobbyists from party positions.

Santoro’s fiercest critics within and beyond the LNP might therefore be unsurprised to hear the powerbroker’s name mixed up in allegations that Chinese billionaire and party donor Huang Xiangmo paid to gain access to the then immigration minister (and fellow Queensland conservative) Peter Dutton to press his case for Australian citizenship. His application was later denied.

The question of how much genuine influence Santoro still wields in Queensland conservative circles is therefore an obvious one, and not easily answered in an opaque world of backroom machinations.

But Chris Salisbury, a close observer of Queensland politics, has a clearer view than most. “Everyone expected Santo’s influence to wane after leaving parliament, but it doesn’t seem to have waned that much,” he says. “The latest imbroglio won’t end Santoro’s influence, either. Santo doesn’t take setbacks lightly. He is still a player and, for someone who’s been out of parliament for so long, it speaks volumes that we’re still talking about him.”

But Salisbury concedes appearances can be deceptive. “Santoro has long floated around the party’s fringes, looking more like an influencer than a key player,” he says. “Making claims of influence over — and access to — current ministers therefore suggests a desperate grab for relevance that might not reflect reality. In fact, I’m surprised by claims of a closeness between Santoro and Dutton.”

Queensland’s political aquarium is small compared with New South Wales and Victoria. LNP or Labor fish don’t have to swim too far, or be very large, to be noticed, courted or feared by party guppies. In that sense, it’s likely Santoro will swim right around this week’s allegations, just as he’s swum around other controversies, and yet again emerge unscathed. Then, in the insular tank of Queensland conservative politics, he will continue to make a splash. •

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What would have been the outcome?

It felt like Labor was heading for victory. At that point Daley had performed well in the campaign; his on-air rebuff of Alan Jones over the demolition of the Allianz Stadium was a defining moment. Gladys Berejiklian was criticised by her own team for not focusing voters on a defining theme. The polls suggested the state was heading for a minority government, from either side.

Then came the final week. The video showed Daley speaking frankly about the negative impact of high immigration on the employment and housing prospects of young people in Sydney — most of it true, saying things you and I could say freely, but a political leader can’t without being misrepresented and called a racist. (Daley’s choice of words was not the best, but to call him racist, for pointing out the negative impacts of high immigration, as the usually judicious Sean Kelly did this morning, is PC triumphing over common sense.)

It wouldn’t have mattered so much had Daley not then made a botch of expressing his own policies in the leaders’ debate. It was on Sky after dark, so nobody saw it, apart from political staffers. But everyone heard about it, and the two events taken together did suggest that Daley was a decent bloke out of his depth.

Did they shift the outcome, from a Labor victory to the re-election of the Berejiklian government,  probably with an absolute majority? Impossible to say for sure, but quite likely.

Antony Green estimates that the Coalition will probably end up with forty-eight of the ninety-three seats in the Assembly, Labor thirty-six, with nine crossbenchers: three Greens, three Shooters and three independents. If so, that would mean the Coalition lost just four seats on Saturday on top of the two it lost earlier in by-elections.

Three of those six losses were to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, whose electorates now cover most of New South Wales: the vast outback seats of Barwon and Murray, as well as Orange. The Coalition also lost Wagga Wagga to an independent, local medico Joe McGirr. But it lost only two seats to Labor.

If that’s right, the Nationals have lost four seats since the 2015 election, but the Liberals just two. And in Barwon and Murray, Shooters candidates Roy Butler and Helen Dalton won by campaigning not on gun issues but on water: trenchantly denouncing the Nationals for failing to protect the Darling’s water for downstream users — farmers, fishers and people in the towns. The photos of masses of dead fish and dark water flowing out of taps sent powerful messages.

The Nationals’ water minister, Niall Blair, has shouldered the blame and will leave politics. Barnaby Joyce ought to do the same, but probably won’t.

It was apparent as soon as counting began on Saturday night that we were seeing two different elections. Parts of the bush, especially west of the Divide, were erupting against what they saw as mismanagement and neglect of their needs. But in Sydney and about half the regional seats, the government was cruising to victory.

Sydney has two-thirds of the state’s people, so its election ruled. Of all Australian cities, it is the one most segregated by income and race, so it has few marginal seats. That allows the government of the day to concentrate its defences — and this government defended its turf very well.

Across New South Wales, on both sides of politics, only a third of the seats were won with majorities of less than 10 per cent. Only one in seven seats were won by majorities of less than 5 per cent. Most seats always vote one way or other, unless an independent or minor party breaks in.

The Coalition had only two marginal seats in Sydney to defend: East Hills (on 0.4 per cent) and Coogee (2.9 per cent). Its next most marginal seat was Penrith, where Labor needed a landslide 6.25 per cent swing. It lost Coogee, but looks likely to retain East Hills and Penrith, if narrowly.

Some parts of Sydney saw big swings against the government. In the southwest, for example, Liberal-voting Camden swung by 10.3 per cent to Labor, while next door in Campbelltown Labor boosted its lead by 11.9 per cent. Just south of them, independent Judy Hannan almost broke through in the mostly rural seat of Wollondilly.

The federal seat of Hume takes in some of Camden and most of Wollondilly. The federal implications of this election were limited, but one of them is clearly for Hume MP and energy minister Angus Taylor, himself under challenge from independent Huw Kingston.

Labor also made gains on the Central Coast, including an 8 per cent swing in Gosford (at federal level, half of the marginal Liberal seat of Robertson). The Coalition’s best area was the middle-southern suburbs, where Chinese migrants reportedly aided a swing that saved East Hills, swelled the Liberal majority in Oatley, and halved the majority of Labor leadership contender Chris Minns in Kogarah. That’s good for immigration minister David Coleman, whose marginal seat of Banks covers the area.

Outside Coogee, Labor’s gains in Sydney were in votes, not seats. East Hills and Penrith were the only other seats where it came close. In Newcastle and Wollongong, the Coalition had no seats to lose anyway, unless you count the hinterland seat of Upper Hunter, which the Nationals successfully defended.

Labor’s other gain was on the North Coast. In 2015, with passions against coal seam gas mining running high, the Greens unexpectedly won Ballina and almost added Lismore. This time they held Ballina, though it looks like Labor will pip them in Lismore to claim the seat. But the Nationals beat Labor out of another on its must-win list, the urban electorate of Tweed (Heads).

In most of New South Wales, this was an election won by the defenders. One lesson is that voters like governments to build infrastructure. We saw that in the Victorian election, and while Gladys Berejiklian’s road and rail projects have been messier and more disruptive of daily life — and are still incomplete — they defined what the Coalition stood for, whereas Daley defined Labor as standing against spending a lot of money on stadiums.

By focusing so much on one issue, Labor dumbed down its message to voters, and took attention away from its policies in other areas. There’s a lesson there.

One surprise was that the Greens did better than expected. The internal turmoil that forced upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham, a moderate, out of the party after hardliners accused him of sexual violence (which he denied) had no impact on voters. The Greens retained their three lower house seats, all with big swings their way, and got even closer to winning Lismore. The negative was that in the council they seem to have lost not only Buckingham but also his seat.

The NSW Electoral Commission has released only strangely limited data on the upper house voting. It gave voting figures for just seven parties, and bundled all the others, plus the informal votes and all the votes filled in below the line, in a big heap marked “others.” Hidden in there, among other things, are the votes for Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm and Sustainable Australia’s William Bourke, and the votes of anyone who takes the trouble to vote for candidates rather than parties.

All we can say with certainty is that the Coalition will win at least seven of the twenty-one seats being contested, Labor six, the Greens two, and the Shooters and One Nation — Mark Latham, that is — one each. Four seats remain to be filled. On the numbers so far, the Coalition could win one of them, One Nation could win a second and the Christian Democrats and Animal Justice also have a chance.

For the Coalition, it was a landmark result in two ways. Gladys Berejiklian was already the first woman to lead a Coalition state government. (Indeed, she and Kate Carnell, as ACT chief minister in the 1990s, are the only women ever to have led a Coalition government in Australia — while Labor has had ten female leaders, in every parliament in the nation.) Now she has been the first female premier outside Queensland to be re-elected — something that was not remotely possible for Kristina Keneally when Labor elected her as NSW premier in late 2009 to try to salvage what she could from the impending wreckage. The Coalition is moving into the twenty-first century, sometimes at glacial pace.

It is also the first time in almost forty years that a state or territory Coalition government has won a third term anywhere in Australia. The Howard government did so at federal level, but the last state or territory leader to win a third term was Sir Charles Court, in Western Australia in 1980. Since then, eight Coalition governments had sought a third term, but every one was thrown out by the voters.

What made this government different?

First, it got off to a stunning start, winning a record 64.2 per cent of the two-party vote in 2011.

Second, it has been a government run by the broad centre of the Liberal Party, rather than by the reactionary right. Mike Baird certainly put voters offside by banning greyhound racing, merging local councils and privatising electricity assets, but this has generally been a government of the middle, not one driven by fringe ideologies.

Third, it has seriously tackled Sydney’s infrastructure backlog — helped by a Sydneycentric federal government that has poured money into transport projects in that city while (until recently) ignoring the needs of Melbourne.

Fourth, Berejiklian may not be the leader to make hard decisions, but she is a conscientious workaholic, and, unlike her federal leader, she comes over as a relatively sincere and sympathetic person.

And fifth, her government got lucky last week, with the Daley video and the TV debate.

Which of these five elements mattered most? You choose. •

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Berejiklian’s swift rise to the premiership a little over two years ago came after the unexpected resignation of Mike Baird. Baird’s popularity had plummeted in the wake of his decisions to amalgamate local councils and ban greyhound racing, both of which were seen as factors behind the Nationals’ surprise loss of the previously safe seat of Orange to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party at a November 2016 by-election.

The new premier’s astute damage control largely neutralised the issues that had brought Baird down and arrested the decline in the government’s fortunes. Nonetheless, Berejiklian’s term was punctuated by a series of difficult by-elections, which were a continuing distraction and destabilising factor. In April 2017, the Liberals narrowly retained the seats of North Sydney and Manly. In October of that year the Nationals survived big swings against them in Cootamundra and Murray. The Wagga by-election in September 2018 saw the previously safe Liberal seat fall to an independent.

A major miscalculation that would haunt Berejiklian throughout this year’s campaign was the decision to demolish and rebuild the Allianz and ANZ stadiums. Although she partially backed off, announcing the ANZ Stadium would be refurbished rather than demolished, the issue fuelled a perception that the government was out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

Berejiklian herself is generally acknowledged to be decent, sincere and hard-working, and to possess high-level administrative skills. Although she lacks Baird’s charismatic charm, she has clearly convinced wavering voters that she is trustworthy and competent.

Less well known, of course, was opposition leader Michael Daley. Elected on 10 November 2018, Daley was thrust almost immediately into an election campaign. But it is worth recalling that his predecessor, Luke Foley, had even less time to prepare for his first campaign as leader, taking the job less than three months before the 2015 election. Foley performed more impressively than Daley against a tougher opponent, Baird, and achieved a two-party-preferred swing to Labor of 10 per cent.

From the beginning, Daley showed an uncertain grasp of issues, stumbling a number of times over details of key policies, most disastrously in a televised debate with the premier on the eve of the poll. The government used allegations of improper conduct by Daley while on Randwick Council to identify him with the scandal-ridden final years of the previous Labor government. It seems likely that the release in the last week of the campaign of a tape of Daley making negative comments about Asian immigrants blunted any momentum he had achieved.

Labor’s largely lacklustre campaign fired briefly when Daley attacked powerful broadcaster Alan Jones over the demolition of Allianz Stadium. But the opposition’s preoccupation with this issue was a mistake, and came at the cost of a failure to project a positive and attractive alternative policy vision.

One traditional analogy for the fall of a government is that of a bus. All the opposition has to do is follow the government’s bus, picking up and comforting passengers when they fall out as it hits a bump or negotiates tight corners. The longer the bus is on the road, the more passengers it loses. This was basically the opposition’s strategy: Daley was hoping that the dissatisfactions and resentments that inevitably accumulate the longer a government is in office would cause voters to elect Labor.

What Labor forgot is that governments can change course and entice passengers back on board, particularly if these passengers are not at all sure that the opposition would give them a smoother ride. Here lies the key to the result: Berejiklian was able to persuade enough voters that the government not only had significant achievements to its credit, particularly in finance and infrastructure, but also still had something to give. Dissatisfaction certainly existed, but Labor failed to convince the electorate that it was the better alternative. •

The post Awake at the wheel appeared first on Inside Story.

Whispers and nervous titters rippled through the audience at the ornate Royal Automobile Club in Sydney. Triggs had just survived public attacks from Tony Abbott and other Coalition ministers over her report on the plight of child asylum seekers in detention. It had been one of the most brutal government character assassinations of a senior statutory official Australia has seen. Was Laundy about to nettle her even more?

On the contrary. He praised Triggs for her work and encouraged her to keep doing the job that Abbott and attorney-general George Brandis had reportedly tried to make her leave. “My door is always open to you,” he told her. She nodded an acknowledgement as the audience applauded.

Of course, an attack on Triggs would have made Laundy an outsider in this crowd. His fellow speakers included race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane and former Fraser government minister Fred Chaney, who launched Soutphommasane’s book I’m Not Racist But… at the same event. Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney-general, also spoke, and so did Penny Wright, an Australian Greens senator.

Where Laundy really has emerged as an odd man out is among his fellow conservatives since he entered parliament at the 2013 election. He stood up for Triggs in the Coalition party room in February, arguing that the real point should be to release children from detention. He threatened to cross the floor against the Abbott government’s plan to change the Racial Discrimination Act to allow hate speech; the government dropped the plan in August.

And last Friday, while Abbott was trumpeting his government’s “stop the boats” policy as Europe’s refugee crisis unfolded, Laundy publicly pleaded for Australia to take more refugees from Syria. “There but for the grace of God go any of us,” he said. His stand flew in the face of a powerful portion of the Liberal Party’s conservative base that opposes bringing in more refugees, but his electoral office was swamped with emails from the public, about 90 per cent of which supported him.

Laundy is an odd Liberal out in other ways, too. He is a small businessman in a party that once identified as the champion of small business but whose front bench is now dominated by lawyers, ex-lobbyists, political advisers and party officials. He is a liberal in a party that has shifted sharply to the right under its last two prime ministers, Abbott and John Howard. And he refuses to identify with the factions that now determine power in the Liberal Party. “I see myself as my own voice,” he says.

I met Laundy in late August in Burwood, one of the inner-western suburbs that make up his electorate of Reid. Named after Australia’s fourth prime minister, George Reid, the seat was for many years a Labor stronghold; incumbents have included former NSW premier Jack Lang and former Whitlam government minister Tom Uren. But Labor’s comfortable margin was cut when a 2010 redistribution brought in much of the neighbouring electorate of Lowe. Three years later the national anti-Labor swing made Laundy – as he later told parliament – “the first Liberal to hold this seat since it was formed” in 1922.

Yet the broader electoral geography still leaves him something of an outsider. Reid is surrounded to the south and west by the traditional western Sydney Labor seats held by opposition frontbenchers Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke, Jason Clare and Julie Owens. Once a working-class Anglo-Australian region, it is now a multicultural heartland. In Burwood alone, almost 60 per cent of citizens were born overseas, many in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and eastern Europe. Laundy reckons his seat is the second most multicultural in federal parliament, after Burke’s seat of Watson next door.

Outwardly, at least, Laundy seems a classic figure of old Australia. At forty-four, he is tall and boyish-faced, and on the day we meet he is dressed smartly in business trousers and a blue pin-striped shirt with no tie. His electoral office in Burwood Road is sparely furnished, with no sign of the lavish use of entitlements that had felled Bronwyn Bishop a couple of weeks earlier.

Laundy’s family story seems classic rags-to-riches. His paternal grandfather, Arthur, left an orphanage at the age of fifteen “with just the clothes on his back” and bought a hotel lease twelve years later. The family business, in which Craig worked for twenty-three years before entering politics, now comprises more than fifty hotels in New South Wales. Laundy still seems to identify as much as a businessman as he does a politician. “I’m a third-generation western suburbs publican,” he tells me.

He joined the Liberal Party only eighteen months before successfully contesting the 2013 election. And he reckons he is one of the first of what he calls a “Labor family on both sides” to support the Liberals, adding yet another layer of complexity to his outsider’s profile.

What attracted him to politics, and especially to the Liberal Party? “I was very frustrated with the former Labor government,” he says. “I believe in small government, low taxation and a genuine safety net. I thought that becoming an MP may be a chance to make a difference. I’d grown up in the western side of the electorate, the Labor side, and I had tentacles there through my involvement with churches, charities and sporting clubs. I have a lot of mates from my small business background who would never go into politics. They think I’m mad. So does my father!”

Laundy’s responses to social issues during his short parliamentary life have been driven by his practical business mind and family life, not by the ideology that drives some sections of the Liberal Party. His stand against the proposed change to the Racial Discrimination Act angered many on the party’s right. But, he says, it also reflected opposition to the change among his multicultural constituents.

“They believe that free speech is a right in Australia, and that rights also involve responsibilities. My pragmatic argument says that too. Pragmatic thinkers on both sides of parliament are in the minority. Ideological thinkers on both sides are in the ascendancy.”

Laundy’s support for Triggs’s call to stop incarcerating child asylum seekers also won him few fans in his party. “If there are findings of hers that allow us to run things better, we should accept them in good faith and act upon them,” he says. This hardly chimes with Abbott’s dismissal of Triggs’s report as a “political stitch-up.” Laundy also wants a more inclusive approach from government to Australia’s Muslim community, despite the Abbott government’s pursuit of a national security policy that seems to cast them as potential enemies.

“There is a marginalised Muslim minority heading to jihad,” he says. “You have to question the cause of the problem first, and I think that’s been missed. The second or third generations of Australian-born eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds have battled with education and finding jobs. That’s where susceptibility is born. We have to stop them ending up at the plane gate to Syria and Iraq. The Australian public responds negatively, and the vicious circle makes them more marginalised. The role of leadership, in government and the communities, is to step in and break the circle. It’s a long-term exercise.”

On same-sex marriage, though, Laundy is not rocking any Liberal boats. He and his wife Suzie attend Catholic churches in the electorate with their three children, and he opposes same-sex marriage on grounds of that faith. At first, he supported a conscience vote in parliament. “The conscience vote that the Liberal Party stands for is important to me,” he tells me. “I would never be a member of a party that you can’t vote against if you want.”

He was later reported to have changed his mind, and to oppose a conscience vote, on this issue at least. But since the bitter Coalition party-room debate in August, which endorsed the government’s opposition to same-sex marriage, Laundy says he once again has an “open mind” on a conscience vote. He argues that the debate has become “aggressive” on both sides, and that those who chose to vote against gay marriage could be vilified. “On the gay marriage side, I’m criticised as a bigot and a homophobe, which I’m definitely not. But I see fault on both sides.”

A few days after our meeting, Laundy escorted foreign minister Julie Bishop to Burwood Girls High School, one of Australia’s most multicultural schools, where she addressed senior students, including some from neighbouring schools. Bishop spoke about women and careers, and fielded questions from the girls about Australia’s human rights record and military involvement in the Middle East. But her visit was quickly swamped by a row over same-sex partners and censorship that erupted a few days later.

The school had planned to show Gayby Baby, a documentary about children of same-sex parents made by Maya Newell, a former student at the school. It had already been shown at the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, and at Parliament House in Sydney. Two days before the scheduled school screening on 28 August, the Daily Telegraph splashed a front-page story headed “Gay Class Uproar,” with the banner “Parents outraged as Sydney school swaps lessons for PC movie session.”

It later emerged that parents had been informed of the screening and given the option of not allowing their daughters to attend. But the furore sparked by the Murdoch tabloid was enough for NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli to order a ban on screenings of Gayby Baby at all the state’s schools during class times. (It passed unremarked that Julie Bishop’s address at the Burwood school had also happened during class hours.)

Laundy publicly supported his state Liberal colleague’s ban on the film. After talks with local parents and community leaders, he claimed “many parents” were concerned the screening in school hours “may create difficulties for their children on the basis of their family’s religious or personal beliefs.”

Beyond this issue, though, Laundy finds his inherent liberalism frequently stalled by the realities of life in politics. If frustrations with the former Labor government drove him into politics in the first place, the process of achieving change as a parliamentarian troubles him just as much, if not more. Again, he comes back to a business analogy.

“In small business it’s about outcomes, not process. My criticism of politics is that the focus is on process ahead of outcomes. In business, before I renovated hotels I talked to staff and customers and worked out what they wanted, then made a decision. In politics, cabinet makes the decision, but then hands the policy to the marginal backbench seat-holders and tells them to go out and sell it. That’s counterintuitive. After two years in politics, the pace of change and the length of time to get decisions is frustrating for me.”

The trend on both sides of politics to recruit candidates from within the party machine makes things even more frustrating for those from a broader background like Laundy’s. “They know the system from a young age and are prepared to live within it. For people like me who come from outside, it’s a big change to make.”

With a federal election due in just a year, Laundy doesn’t conceal a sense of irritation over the Abbott government’s inertia on economic reform. “I get frustrated when discussions are about do we apply a GST on tampons. You should be talking about reforming the whole tax system, as well as federation, and preparing the country for the next forty years.”

The Abbott government’s entrenched opinion poll deficit has rattled many backbenchers, especially those who may have nowhere to turn for lives outside politics if the government falls in 2016 and they lose their seats. On this score, Laundy once again could be an odd man out. He won Reid in 2013 with a 3.5 per cent swing. But if the still-marginal seat eventually swings back to Labor, he will be happy to say he tried. “I’d rather lose my seat standing for something, and standing for reform, than govern for the sake of governing,” he says. And if that happened? “I can go back to my family business job any time.” •

The post The Liberal nonconformist from Sydney’s west appeared first on Inside Story.

“Could” is not really claiming much; under Scott Morrison the Coalition “could” win the election too. This might be why the Sydney Morning Herald turned up the volume by changing the “could” to a “would” in the headline “I would have beaten Labor: Julie Bishop.”

In the same interview, the former foreign minister also described how she had “felt confident [of winning the leadership] after the assurances I had received over the phone,” from twenty-eight MPs. That number was whittled down to just eleven by fellow “moderates,” led by Christopher Pyne, who were terrified that if Bishop rather than Morrison faced Peter Dutton in the second round then Dutton would win. In the end, Morrison narrowly defeated Dutton 45–40.

If the aim was to stop Dutton, Pyne and company were absolutely right to urge colleagues to vote strategically. The home affairs minister would have easily defeated Bishop. Her “confidence” was misplaced.

If it had been up to the general public, or even Coalition supporters, Bishop would have been elected. Then again, the voters would have preferred Malcolm Turnbull to remain leader. The demolition of Turnbull’s leadership wasn’t really about who was most likely to win the next election; it was an ideological spasm presented as a matter of survival. Perhaps some of the plotters even believed their own press, that Dutton represented their best chance for a third term.

It was also driven by the opinion polls. If the government had seemed headed for a likely victory (as opposed to having a decent chance) Turnbull would have been safe.

Much of Bishop’s breezy appeal is the product of five years as foreign minister. The position flatters its occupants, even — or especially — when the government is experiencing political difficulties. Foreign ministers soar above the ugly and the banal of domestic politics; they hobnob with international good and great, and don’t lower themselves to grubby parochial argy-bargy. (A rare foray into the latter, involving the NZ opposition Labour Party, didn’t go well for Bishop in 2017.)

She is also a highly talented individual: you’d have to be to become the first female deputy leader of that seething cesspit of white male resentment.

But we only have to recall her short, inglorious tenure as shadow treasurer, from September 2008 to February 2009, to be reminded of her limitations. (If  these have slipped your mind, they included over-enthusiasm for the Laffer curve, and plagiarism.)

Of course, sexism is ingrained in the Liberal Party, and Labor Party, Australian politics and indeed society at large. But contrary to a hell of a lot of rewriting, Bishop didn’t miss out on the leadership last August because of her sex. It was her politics that did her in.

Bishop was a “progressive,” close to Turnbull and hence detested almost as much as he was by Sky After Dark and the self-appointed Liberal “base.” She was and is seen as having been insufficiently loyal to Tony Abbott in his time of need in 2015. The party having just torn Turnbull down, it would have been utterly untenable to replace him with someone almost as ideologically unsound.

The Liberal leadership swings back and forth between its wings like a kind of pendulum: Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Turnbull again, Scott Morrison. Right, left, right, left, right. It was a right-winger’s turn.

Morrison emerged as last year’s compromise candidate, but in reality the party baulked at voting for the most conservative person in cabinet and went instead for the second-most conservative.

So, yes, doubts about her discipline notwithstanding, Bishop would probably stand a better chance than Morrison, or Dutton, of leading the party to victory. But then, so did Turnbull. Given her star power, it’s likely that if, somehow, she had emerged prime minister, there would have been a boost in the polls, with the Coalition even taking the lead for a while. But these things have a habit of going back to normal.

Can the Coalition win the election in May? The perpetually angry “base” project their preoccupations onto the general population, demanding the party leadership prioritises refugees and climate change. But if this government is to be re-elected, it won’t be because of those issues. Nor will it be because it is headed by someone widely liked and admired (or, at least, liked and admired at first).

If the government does survive it will be largely due to a humungous scare campaign against the opposition’s policies on housing and dividend imputation. In the end, leadership popularity only takes you so far. Voters consider choosing their next government a serious business.

But will Bishop really leave parliament?

The chances of Morrison being dragged down before the next election are small but not negligible. Australian politics remains poll obsessed, the Liberal Party riven with personal enmities and mutterings of double crossing, and if Team Dutton rises from the ashes to demolish another prime minister, the party room would almost certainly, once again, decline to reward their treachery.

This time the dynamic would push towards someone on the progressive side, a candidate closer to the electoral middle ground. And with an election imminent, they would be freed up to consider what the voters would prefer, and who might provide that quick opinion poll bounce. Who might save the furniture?

That, of course, would be the former foreign minister. As a fellow West Australian, washed-up former state opposition leader Colin Barnett, showed a decade ago, retirement announcements can be retracted and preselected replacements can be unselected.

Whether Bishop would want the leadership is another matter. But the party room would try to convince her.

And if they got all their ducks in a row, they “could” even win the election.•

The post Could Julie Bishop win the next election? appeared first on Inside Story.

Transposing the state vote to federal boundaries would see the Liberals lose five seats in Melbourne and a sixth, Corangamite, in the hinterland of Geelong. Of their other seven seats, three would be left on a knife edge, with another three potentially within Labor’s reach.

On state voting figures, Labor would have won the federal Liberal seats of Corangamite, Dunkley, Chisholm, Casey, Higgins and La Trobe. It would also have come within 1 per cent of winning Deakin, Flinders and Goldstein, and within 2.5 per cent of winning Kooyong, Menzies and Aston.

On the state voting, the Liberals’ only safe seats in Victoria are now the Western District seat of Wannon and the West Gippsland seat of Monash (the renamed McMillan). All of the party’s other twelve seats in Victoria are at risk of being lost.

Opinion polls carried out by ReachTEL for the CFMEU in November and December reported Labor leading the Liberals by 53–47 in Higgins and 52–48 in Kooyong. But individual seat polling in Australia has proved erratic. Instead, we present here the first published estimates of what the 3.7 million actual votes cast in Victoria’s state election would mean if replicated on the new federal boundaries.

They send a warning of disaster ahead. Unless the Morrison government does vastly better in May than its state counterparts did six months earlier, Victoria alone would tip it out of office.

The Coalition has already done badly from the Victorian redistribution. Labor gained a new seat in Fraser, Dunkley became a Labor seat on its new boundaries, and Corangamite is lineball. Add the spectacle of Julia Banks, the party’s heroine in 2016, quitting her marginal seat of Chisholm in protest at attempts by unnamed Liberals to order her how to vote on the leadership, and the Liberals already looked likely to lose three Victorian seats, and possibly more.

If the state election vote is repeated, they will lose much more. The ABC’s Antony Green estimates that on the new boundaries alone, the Liberals won 53.2 per cent of the two-party vote in La Trobe, 54.5 per cent in Casey, and 60.1 per cent in Higgins. On state election voting, all three would be Labor seats.

Similarly, Green estimates the Coalition’s 2016 vote on the new boundaries as 56.4 per cent in Deakin, 57 per cent in Greg Hunt’s seat of Flinders and 62.7 per cent in Tim Wilson’s seat of Goldstein. On state voting, its majority in all three has slumped to less than 1 per cent.

The question is whether the state voting pattern will be repeated. State and federal elections are fought on different issues, with different leaders and different candidates — or at least they usually are. State Liberals say their poll ratings nosedived after their federal colleagues dumped Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister, and have never recovered.

The most surprising thing about the landslide in Victoria last November is how little difference it has made to the Morrison government’s policies and style. Yes, there have been token changes to give women more prominence in the government and make it appear that the government is tackling climate change. But they were transparent marketing ploys. The government is simultaneously promoting new investment in coal-fired generation — possibly subsidised by taxpayers — while halving Australia’s emissions reduction target by using a legal loophole that global negotiations have yet to approve.

For Morrison and his ministers, it’s been business as usual, despite an election in which Victorian voters made it clear they don’t like the way the Coalition is doing business.

Queensland has seen sustained differences between federal and state voting — the Coalition does better federally, and Labor better at state level. But there is no such pattern in Victoria. In 2010, in fact, the Coalition won the state election with 52 per cent of the two-party vote, but was thrashed in the federal poll, scraping just 44.7 per cent.

At last November’s state election, on my estimate, Labor won 57.6 per cent of the two-party vote. At federal level, Newspolls carried out between October and December found Labor with 56 per cent of the two-party vote in Victoria, down marginally from 57 per cent in the previous six weeks.

The state vote showed a landslide swing of 5.8 per cent against the Liberals and Nationals since their 48.2 per cent vote at the federal election in July 2016.

The swing was largest in Melbourne and “inner Victoria” — roughly, areas within 150 kilometres of Melbourne, including Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong. It was much less in the outlying seats, in most of which Labor made only a token effort. Apart from Corangamite, no Coalition seat in country Victoria would be threatened by the state election vote.

But Labor’s two-party vote in Melbourne seats surged from 54.4 per cent in July 2016 to 61.2 per cent in November 2018: a colossal swing of 6.8 per cent. And the heaviest swings of all were in Melbourne’s blue-ribbon Liberal seats, where Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity had pushed the Liberal vote up in 2016 when it was falling in most of Australia.

Higgins, which includes Melbourne’s richest suburb, Toorak, would be among the casualties. On my estimate, the state voting figures saw Labor win 51.8 per cent of the vote. It has never come close to winning Higgins before.

That was a swing of almost 12 per cent from the votes cast in the 2016 federal election. It seems incredibly large, yet similar swings were recorded in Melbourne’s two other traditional blue-blood Liberal seats in the inner-middle suburbs: Goldstein, centred on Brighton, and Kooyong, covering Hawthorn and Kew.

At the state election, Labor unexpectedly won Hawthorn in a swing of 9 per cent, its first victory there since 1952. It won a similar swing to almost take Brighton, where it had never been within cooee before. And it won swings of more than 10 per cent in Malvern (Higgins) and Bentleigh (half of which is in Goldstein).

In 2016, all three blue-blood seats were among the few where the Liberal vote rose from its 2013 level — a high-water mark in most of Australia — as well as being higher than at the 2014 state election. It’s fair to assume that was because voters saw Turnbull, as he seemed then, as their kind of guy.

But Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy was not their kind of guy, and neither, I suspect, is Scott Morrison. Relative to 2016, on my estimate, the Liberal vote in 2018 crashed by 11.1 per cent in Kooyong, 11.9 per cent in Higgins, and 11.8 per cent in Goldstein. It is the strongest vote Labor has ever racked up in this Liberal heartland.

The federal member for Kooyong is treasurer Josh Frydenberg. He’ll be battling an independent Liberal, Oliver Yates, former head of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, who is running to highlight the government’s refusal to tackle climate change seriously. Josh knows his history, and is no doubt aware that the only time his party has ever lost Kooyong was in 1922, when John Latham, later opposition leader and chief justice, ran as an independent Liberal with the aim of forcing Billy Hughes to step down as prime minister. He succeeded.

Kelly O’Dwyer, minister for women, jobs and industrial relations, announced in January that she would not recontest Higgins, but take time out to focus on her family. After six years as a minister, and with the Coalition facing a few years in opposition, she probably would have made that decision anyway, but the bleak outlook for her own seat would have confirmed it.

Labor ran dead in Higgins in 2016, and the Greens’ Jason Ball came second, though well short of winning. But the Green-voting booth of Windsor has been shifted into Macnamara (nee Melbourne Ports), Labor booths have been added in the southeast of the seat, and media coverage of the Greens has been dominated by their vituperative internal feuding. The state election showed a huge swing to Labor, with the Greens’ share of the three-party vote in Higgins crashing from 28 per cent to just under 20 per cent, while Labor soared past.

The member for Goldstein is Tim Wilson, chair of the House economics committee. His insouciantly opportunistic management of its inquiry into franking credits may well have added to his own re-election problems. Labor still has no candidate, and apparently no intention of wasting money on a seat it still sees as out of reach. Wilson should be relieved: on state voting, his majority shrivelled from 12.7 per cent in 2016 to 0.9 per cent in 2018.

If the state vote bears any resemblance to the federal vote ahead, then Dunkley and Corangamite are already lost. The redistribution shifted some very strong Labor areas north of Frankston into Dunkley, and the election saw the state seat of Frankston swing from ultra-marginal to safe Labor. On my estimate, the Liberals won just 42.7 per cent of the two-party vote.

It was even worse in Corangamite, where Liberal MP Sarah Henderson held off Labor in 2016 with 53.1 per cent of the final vote. She has been a serious victim of the redistribution, which radically changed the design of the two Geelong seats, moving the best Liberal suburbs into Corio, some strong Labor suburbs into Corangamite, and conservative farming areas around Colac into Wannon. Antony Green estimates this wiped out Henderson’s majority entirely. At the state election the Coalition’s vote on the new boundaries shrank to just over 41 per cent.

The eastern suburbs seat of Chisholm was the Liberals’ sole gain nationwide in 2016, partly because Labor’s former speaker, Anna Burke, retired, costing Labor her personal vote. Julia Banks won the seat for the Liberals, but since Turnbull was forced out and she quit the party, it’s been seen as another almost-certain loss. It will be a historic contest, however, with two Chinese-Australian women — Jennifer Yang (Labor) and Gladys Liu (Liberal) — competing for an electorate with many Chinese migrants. At the state election, Labor won 53 per cent of the vote.

La Trobe, once in Melbourne’s outer northeast, has gradually migrated southeast to Pakenham. The redistribution has improved the odds for Liberal MP Jason Wood — Green estimates it lifted his majority from 1.5 to 3.2 per cent — but under the new boundaries, it’s almost a different electorate from the one the former counterterrorism cop first won in 2004. And on state voting, it too would go to Labor, if only narrowly: 51 per cent to 49.

Wood’s old home in Ferny Creek is now in Casey, normally a safe outer-eastern suburban seat, and held by the speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith. Smith won it in 2016 with 56.1 per cent of the vote, but the redistribution gave him the Labor suburbs Wood lost, cutting his notional majority to 4.5 per cent. On state election voting, the Labor landslide capsized that completely, and the Liberal vote dropped to just 47.3 per cent.

The big question is whether Smith’s personal vote will counteract that. He is seen by observers across the board as one of the best speakers, perhaps the best, that the House has had in a long time. But there are probably not many voters in Casey who follow the proceedings of the House. As a rule of thumb, only about half the voters in urban seats can even name their MP. And this is not Westminster, where both sides follow a convention that the speaker should be unopposed at elections.

In several other safe Liberal seats the state election saw Labor come very close. Apart from Goldstein and Kooyong, they include Deakin (where the Liberal vote fell to 50.3 per cent), Flinders (50.5), Menzies (52.3) and Aston (52.4). While it would be a stretch for Labor to win any of these, the first three are certainly not entirely out of reach.

Deakin is held by the hard right’s Michael Sukkar. With a notional margin of 6.4 per cent on the new boundaries, you would think him safe, yet Labor unexpectedly picked up Ringwood and Bayswater at the state election, and on my estimate it was within 300 votes of having the numbers in Deakin. If there is a voter reaction against Sukkar’s role in dumping Malcolm Turnbull, it could be crucial. Deakin and Corangamite are Victoria’s bellwether seats: at the past eight elections, whoever wins them has won government.

Flinders is held by health minister Greg Hunt, one of Peter Dutton’s key supporters in his leadership bid. It is also where Julia Banks is making her stand against bullying in the federal Liberal Party. The state election saw Labor win the Mornington Peninsula resort seat of Nepean (formerly Dromana) for only the second time in fifty years, and loom close in Hastings. Hunt’s notional majority is 7 per cent, but on state election voting, Labor came within 0.5 per cent.

Add the Turnbull factor, add the Banks factor, and Hunt too is under serious threat. For what it’s worth, Sportsbet now shows Labor as odds-on to win both Deakin and Flinders.

Former defence minister Kevin Andrews, another man of the hard right, used to have the safest Liberal seat in Melbourne. But the redistribution has shifted his outer-suburban seat of Menzies to include Labor-voting Eltham. Antony Green estimates this has trimmed his majority from 10.6 per cent to a notional 7.8 per cent — and at the state election, Labor sliced that to 2.3 per cent. Andrews needed head office intervention to retain preselection after a branch revolt, and his personal vote could well be negative. Keep watching.

Aston, in the foothills of the Dandenongs, saw a similar vote at the state election. The bookies have it at shorter odds than Menzies, Goldstein or Kooyong, but in my view it’s probably the safest Liberal seat in Melbourne after Russell Broadbent’s electorate of Monash (nee McMillan), where outer Melbourne meets West Gippsland. On state voting, the Liberals would have retained Monash by 5.3 per cent, and on a rough estimate, education minister Dan Tehan would have held his Western District seat of Wannon by a similar margin.

On the other side of the ledger, the state vote gives the Coalition no prospect of winning any of the eighteen Victorian seats held by Labor, or the new seat of Fraser, or the Greens seat of Melbourne. Its best chance on paper is in Macnamara, the renamed Melbourne Ports, but the state election saw its vote there crash 8 per cent from 2016 levels.

The only Victorian seat the Coalition has a realistic chance of gaining is Indi, where independent MP Cathy McGowan is stepping down after six years, making way for health researcher Helen Haines. Moreover, former MP Sophie Mirabella will not be standing again, and it’s clear that voters’ antipathy to Mirabella played a big part in McGowan’s victories.

At the state election, the Coalition held off challenges from independents in Benambra, Eildon, Euroa and Ovens Valley, the four state seats that overlap with Indi. Only Benambra (Wodonga) was close. This suggests that, with McGowan and Mirabella no longer the contestants, there’s a strong chance that one or other Coalition party will win Indi back this time.

If Victorians vote at the federal election exactly as they voted at the state election, the crossbench stands to lose another seat. Adam Bandt has held Melbourne for the Greens since 2010, with increasingly large majorities. But at the state election, Labor outpolled the Greens in his electorate, by 52 per cent to 48.

Yet, as with Indi, the personalities matter. Labor won that notional majority at the state election with a 3.6 per cent swing in the seat of Richmond, where a popular Labor member, planning minister Richard Wynne, beat Greens candidate Kathleen Maltzahn for the third time in a row. The federal election will have a different cast. In the state seat of Melbourne, Labor won a 1.1 per cent swing, but the Greens retained the seat.

The difference here between state and federal voting is marked. Even at the 2014 state election, the Greens barely edged out Labor on votes within the federal electorate. Yet when the real contest came at the 2016 federal election, Bandt thrashed his Labor opponent, winning 47 per cent of the three-party vote to Labor’s 26 per cent.

In the inner suburbs, personalities matter a lot. Thousands of voters oscillate freely between Labor and the Greens, judging them not only by their stance on the issues that matter most to them, but also by their candidates. In 2016 Labor almost lost Batman and Melbourne Ports because its MPs, David Feeney and Michael Danby, did not appeal to inner suburban progressives (Danby offset this to some extent by being a vote-winner in the Jewish community). When Ged Kearney replaced Feeney in Batman, Labor’s vote there returned to normal.

Adam Bandt would be a tough opponent for Labor to knock over. The punters have him as the clear favourite for the seat, and I suspect they’re right.

Taken literally, the state election voting would see Labor win six seats from the Coalition and one from the Greens, giving it twenty-six of Victoria’s thirty-eight seats. The Coalition would be reduced to eleven (eight Liberals, three Nationals), with Indi impossible to call.

The punters are not always right — they often overstate the Liberals’ chances and understate the swings — but for what it’s worth, Sportsbet’s seat-by-seat odds imply similar numbers. The punters are backing Labor to take Chisholm, Corangamite, Deakin, Dunkley, Flinders and La Trobe, while the Liberals retain Casey, Higgins and the rest. They see the Greens holding Melbourne, and Indi as evenly balanced.

You might have thought the landslide in Victoria on 24 November would send such a jolt through the federal cabinet room that it would lead Morrison and his ministers to make serious policy changes. That’s the kind of response Menzies would have made.

Instead, nothing has happened, except that ministers in the prime of their careers are announcing their retirements — while assuring us that they are confident that the government will be re-elected.

Yes, of course. We believe you. As you assume we always do. •

The post Twilight of the Liberals? appeared first on Inside Story.

These battles mostly occur out of the glare of the media — though every now and then an exception proves the rule. From what little we know about this one, there is no anointed candidate lined up to walk into the spot. Former state MPs and candidates, ministerial chiefs of staff, party apparatchiks and rank-and-file members are all having a whack. It looks to be an open contest, and one that could get rough if previous Higgins preselections are anything to go by.

Higgins has been subject of fierce contestation and challenge for a generation or more. There’s no mystery about why: it’s seen as a “leadership seat” for the Liberals. Since the boundaries were first drawn in 1949, a new member for Higgins has always been regarded as a future leader or, indeed, has immediately become leader of the Liberal party room in Canberra. A very safe conservative seat covering Melbourne’s wealthy inner suburbs — your Tooraks, your South Yarras, your Armadales and Malverns — Higgins has given its representative ample time for climbing the greasy pole in Canberra, time that might otherwise have needed to be spent in Bunnings car parks and bowls club AGMs working a more marginal constituency with an eye to the next election. It has allowed the member for Higgins to be a high-ranking minister, twice treasurer, twice prime minister. By definition, it seems, this MP is destined for glory.

And yet Higgins has never produced the long-serving, transformative leader that might be expected of it. Members for Higgins have not quite made it to enduring greatness. Their leaderships have been cut short, or they have never got there in the first place; never quite assumed the leadership, and never quite succeeded in remaking the Liberal Party in their image, as other leaders — Menzies, Fraser, Howard — have. The member for Higgins seems at once to have enormous potential and to never quite meet it. It is the Curse of Higgins.

Harold Holt, for example, was an up-and-comer from the start. By the time he transferred to Higgins in 1949, he had spent fourteen years in parliament and was considered a star. In 1935 he had fended off five other candidates to gain United Australia Party preselection for Fawkner, apparently with consequential and possibly underhanded help from the Australian Women’s National League. (Indeed, according to Smith’s Weekly, Holt’s election confirmed to “the he-men of the party” that “the U.A.P. has gradually but definitely drifted under ‘petticoat’ control.”) Within four years he was minister without portfolio in the first Menzies government, and as early as 1958, when he succeeded Arthur Fadden as treasurer, he was seen as Menzies’s heir apparent.

As prime minister, Holt led the Liberals to a landslide win in 1966. His government looked positively progressive compared with Menzies’s — if not on cold war matters, then very much so on social and cultural ones. He led the (cautious) dismantling of the White Australia policy, made trips to Asian countries never before visited by an Australian prime minister, and appeared frequently on television to communicate more directly with the electorate. It was a more relaxed, more modern Liberal Party, one that wanted to embrace the future rather than cling to a bygone era. Just how far along that path Holt would have taken the party we don’t know; his disappearance at Cheviot Beach in 1967 meant he was gone before he could really wrest the party from the overbearing legacy of Robert Menzies.

John Gorton, on the other hand, had become Liberal leader before being selected as member for Higgins. Having been chosen after the Country Party vetoed the elevation of Billy McMahon to the top job, Gorton needed to shift from the Senate to the lower house. He nominated for Higgins unopposed, easily won the seat, and then guided the Liberals into a new phase of post-Menzies modernisation, advocating for a more pragmatic, reform-friendly, problem-solving approach than had been the norm under his predecessors. His vision was nationalistic, even isolationist: he wound down Australia’s commitment in Vietnam and generally questioned the long-established Forward Defence doctrine of countering communism everywhere in Asia.

Gorton was also a centralist, seeking to boost the involvement of the federal government in areas traditionally left to the states. In this and other areas, he sought to radically transform the Liberal Party. As Quadrant magazine observed in 1968, Gortonism was “exceedingly difficult for the traditional Liberal Party to digest.” Indeed, the Liberals eventually found the task impossible. In 1971 Gorton faced a party-room challenge, the vote tying. He took that as a vote of no-confidence and, bitterly, resigned. He quit the Liberal Party altogether in 1975, sickened by Malcom Fraser’s blocking of supply but more generally believing that the Liberals had become a tribal, hardcore right-wing party, miles away from the pragmatic, centrist Gortonism that had never really taken hold.

Gorton’s replacement in Higgins, Roger Shipton, a local party activist, never quite ascended to the heights of his august predecessors. Perhaps we could more charitably say that Shipton was ill-favoured by fortune. Upon Shipton’s death, Labor senator Robert Ray suggested that he could well have succeeded Holt in 1968 — giving him an early shot at a ministry, perhaps — were a seat not required for Gorton’s shift to the lower house. Then, eight years after he replaced Gorton, and just as he was looking ready to be brought into cabinet, the Fraser government was defeated by Bob Hawke in the 1983 election.

Shipton failed to impress during the cut-throat years in opposition, and party schemers began to eye his seat. In 1989, a plot was hatched to have then–Liberal Party president John Elliott installed in Higgins so he could seize the party leadership from John Howard. Had it come off, Higgins would once again have produced an immediate leader — who knows, perhaps even a third prime minister. But Shipton refused to budge, untempted by offers of board positions and cushy corporate jobs. Elliott held back, and Andrew Peacock toppled Howard instead, taking the party close but not quite all the way to government in 1990.

Plucky young Peter Costello didn’t hold back. With the assistance of Michael Kroger, he laid siege to Higgins, eventually trouncing Shipton ninety-seven votes to twenty-six in the 1989 preselection. With Costello, the Liberals had not only installed leadership material but a new kind of Liberal: a hardcore dry. Shipton was one of three “old Liberals” to be turfed out by the New Right in Victoria that year — Ian Macphee in Goldstein would be ousted by David Kemp, and Ken Aldred was defeated in Bruce by Julian Beale.

As treasurer and heir apparent to Howard, Costello became a dominant figure in the Victorian Liberals, shifting the ideological hue of the party. But he never quite made it to the pinnacle of the party, never quite got the chance to become the long-term leader Higgins seems to demand. Again and again, Howard failed to hand over the reins to his treasurer, as Menzies had for Holt; again and again, Costello failed to challenge Howard. To the surprise of many, he refused to contest the party leadership following the 2007 election. Instead, he retired in 2009, triggering a by-election and a fierce preselection contest for his seat. Though his legacy as treasurer was profound, he never truly managed to step out from John Howard’s shadow. The Liberal Party Costello left was a firmly Howardite one.

The initial set of names being bandied around in 2009 spoke to Higgins’s new status as a seat for right-wing high-flyers. Andrew Bolt, Michael Kroger, Tom Elliott, John Roskam and Tim Wilson were all talked about in party circles. In the end, the contest came down to Costello staffer and NAB lawyer Kelly O’Dwyer, and BRW rich-lister Andrew Abercrombie. Though many other candidates were cleared out of her path by her party patrons, O’Dwyer nonetheless faced some bitter opposition. Sophie Mirabella, the party’s women’s affairs spokesperson at the time, claimed some preselectors had been told Higgins was “not a seat for a woman because it’s a leadership seat,” and that the responsibilities of parliament might break up O’Dwyer’s marriage.

Abercrombie’s camp denied using such arguments, but clearly gender attitudes were a real problem for women in the Liberal Party, then as now — an especially amazing situation considering that women had been the key power bloc, the constituency that had to be won over, during Harold Holt’s 1935 preselection. Despite the resistance, though, O’Dwyer prevailed, the first woman to be endorsed for a safe Liberal seat in metropolitan Melbourne, and once again almost instantly an influential frontbencher.

Ten years later, Kelly O’Dwyer is leaving politics. Though she professes that her reasons are strictly personal, it is difficult not to interpret her resignation in terms of the party’s bitter ideological contest. Like her predecessors in Higgins, O’Dwyer didn’t manage to lead the party into a new era. Her politics, economically dry but socially rather progressive, can’t be said to have flourished in the Liberal Party under Tony Abbott, or even under Malcolm Turnbull. Indeed, mere months before announcing her resignation, O’Dwyer was reported to have warned her colleagues that the Liberals had become widely regarded as “homophobic, anti-women climate deniers.” Like all members for Higgins, she leaves the seat failing to have left an enduring legacy.

This time around, astonishingly, the Liberal candidate for Higgins may not even become the Liberal member for Higgins. Recent polls suggest as much as a 10 per cent swing against the Liberals in Higgins, which would send a Labor MP to represent Toorak and Malvern in Canberra. Perhaps that coup won’t come off, but at the very least we can probably expect Higgins to go from safe to marginal this year. That means more time spent in those Bunnings car parks and bowls club AGMs, and less time building a ministerial career in Canberra. It may well be that for at least a few election cycles Higgins will be a leadership seat no more.

On one level, that might sound like a step down for the member for Higgins. Then again, this might be just the thing to lower those overburdensome expectations; to allow whomever the Liberals preselect to just quietly do their thing, work their way up, perhaps even become leader one day despite having to work hard to keep their seat. Indeed, perhaps because they have to fight to hold their seat, because they are more in touch with the community and hardened by the challenge of keeping their head above water every three years, they will develop the hardiness needed to survive as a long-term leader. It’s no guarantee, but this could be just the thing to finally break the Curse of Higgins. •

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Kroger has been involved in countless campaigns and is supposed to be one of the smart ones, but this piece of straw-clutching was nonsensical. Independents don’t usually win marginal seats; they nearly always take territory that was formerly very safe for one major party or the other.

Sophie Mirabella received 52.6 per cent of the primary vote in Indi in 2010 but was tipped out by Cathy McGowan at the next outing. In Mayo, Jamie Briggs got 53.8 in 2013, yet three years later lost to Rebekha Sharkie of the Centre Alliance.

Hunt is likely to survive, but not because of his primary vote last time round. It will be because Banks is largely unknown outside the political bubble — and besides, it’s always difficult for an independent to snatch a seat.

The media stories about the “rise” of female, progressive, centre-right independents seem to brush over one rather crucial detail: so far they’re only candidates. From some of the commentary you’d think that not only has Hunt already been sent packing but Zali Steggall has knocked off Tony Abbott in Warringah and McGowan’s Indi baton has been handed seamlessly to Helen Haines.

Oh, and some former Liberal guy called Oliver Yates has knocked off Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong.

It’s all a bit premature.

One key theme of the narrative is that the Coalition’s refusal to take serious action on climate change is driving its supporters elsewhere. Now, the Liberals and Nationals do have a problem with climate change, and it largely derives from Tony Abbott’s electoral success as leader. Opposing serious action is now an article of faith among the noisy, bossy, self-appointed representatives of the Liberal “base” who proliferate on Sky News After Dark. And when a party is doing poorly it tends to be more susceptible to the preoccupations of its few remaining supporters — or at least those with the loudest voices.

But climate change policy has repeatedly been overrated as an election issue by the political class and party strategists, and it’s not going to be a huge driver of the 2019 result.

Then there’s the more general complaint about this government. In retiring cabinet minister Kelly O’Dwyer’s immortal (reported) words, it is seen as a bunch of “homophobic, anti-women, climate change deniers.” That’s problematic for a major party, and it’s one of the reasons it appears headed for defeat this year. But those conditions applied under Abbott, too, and the party still won big in 2013.

At this point, the only non-sitting independent candidate who is likely to win is Rob Oakeshott in Cowper (New South Wales). Of the rest we know about, Steggall, assisted by all the splendid publicity, probably stands the best chance, followed by Haines. Banks is unlikely, and Yates — yeah, nah.

That’s not to say there won’t be any new faces on the House of Representatives crossbench after May. Other contenders will emerge from the woodwork between now and then, and in the final weeks of the campaign we’ll have a much better idea of which of them is in with a chance.

When Steggall arrived on the scene late last month, the commentariat excitement was immediate. She ticks many of the boxes: former Olympian, lawyer, sits on this and that committee, has always voted Liberal, opposes Labor’s economic policies — and importantly is running against Abbott, who is known to be on the nose on his home turf. Within hours of the announcement, the betting markets, those distillers of general expectations, had her as slight favourite to win Warringah.

But winning a seat the first time as an independent is no doddle. Thousands have tried and failed. Steggall’s assertion on Sky News that she has never voted for Abbott was a clanger that will return to haunt her — it means, for example, that she never voted for the Howard government (assuming she was in Warringah that whole time), though she presumably preferenced Abbott ahead of Labor candidates. At time of writing Abbott is again the slight favourite among punters.

Kerryn Phelps also ticked the boxes in Wentworth, but she has had a national profile for years and was running in an empty seat, many of whose voters were annoyed at the political execution of their former MP. During the campaign she was helped by the Opera House sails fiasco, courtesy of the obnoxious self-appointed Liberal guardian Alan Jones, and further assistance arrived in the form of government senators voting in support of a neo-Nazi slogan. And then came the undergraduate Israel embassy announcement.

Most importantly, Wentworth was a by-election, so the identity of the next government was not at stake.

A majority of the current crossbench is female, and all four women sit in electorates that would never elect a Labor member. Three of them (McGowan is the exception; her personal politics are unclear) seem to be traditional Liberal supporters alienated by the party’s social conservativism. It’s one thing to anticipate that this might be the start of a trend, another to celebrate the arrival of people who are, so far, merely candidates.

Declining major-party support must, eventually, be felt somewhere. Statistically, if five independent or minor candidates are each judged to have only a 20 per cent chance of success, there’s a 67 per cent chance one (or more) of them will win. We just don’t know which one.

Yes, the crossbench is likely to grow this year. But, Oakeshott aside, it probably won’t include any of the current candidates we know of. After the result we can all explain the hows and whys of each new independent or third-party victory.

Doing that months in advance, through the prism of fleeting impressions generated by the general media and social media zeitgeist, is most unwise. •

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Pressure is building within Coalition ranks to go before things get worse. A key driver is the looming NSW election, on 23 March, which many Coalition members fear could resemble the tsunami that hit the party in Victoria late last year. Replicated federally, a swing like Victoria’s would drive deep into what is regarded as Liberal heartland. Party polling, as one MP put it, is “not looking good.”

The Victorian federal seat of Dunkley, now held by the Liberals, has already become a notional Labor seat after redistribution. A slew of Victorian seats is at risk, including Corangamite, Chisholm, La Trobe, Casey, Deakin, Flinders, Aston and Menzies. Federal results don’t necessarily match state outcomes, of course, but Scott Morrison’s government is clearly in big trouble and has been for quite some time.

While federal Liberals still insist the loss in Victoria was all about state issues, the fact is that the Liberal brand is on the nose. This was reinforced by the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull, who was popular in Victoria, and by the party’s well-publicised woman problem, reignited after Turnbull’s departure by Julia Banks’s complaints of bullying and right-wing extremism and, more recently, by the announced departure of Kelly O’Dwyer.

NSW Liberals fear that the current timetable — with the state election in March and the federal poll in May — gives voters another chance to punish state Liberals for federal offences. If the federal election were to come first, some believe, then the anger may dissipate.

Indications in New South Wales suggest that Labor might be on track to pick up the thirteen seats it needs to win back government in Macquarie Street. Before his forced resignation last year over sexual harassment allegations, former Labor leader Luke Foley had overtaken premier Gladys Berejiklian as preferred premier. Labor’s new leader, Michael Daley, has yet to be polled.

The storm created by Scott Morrison’s parachuting of former Labor national president Warren Mundine into the marginal seat of Gilmore will inevitably complicate both elections, and constitutes a further reason for an election to be held before the infighting escalates.

Gilmore was already contentious after the sitting MP, Ann Sudmalis, announced she wouldn’t be recontesting the seat because of her concerns about branch-stacking — another blow for the Liberals. It’s hard to see how Scott Morrison’s intervention will rescue the seat, generating as it has a split in the Liberal vote with the disendorsed candidate set to run as an independent.

In Canberra, meanwhile, public service departments have been asked this week to provide the information and briefing papers normally requested just before the caretaker period.

There are good reasons not to call the election this weekend, of course. Given the need to minimise the overlap between the state and federal battles, the campaign would necessarily be short — and that might not appeal to a PM widely seen as the underdog. The Liberals still have unfinished preselection business, creating a risk of further factional conflict alongside the already destabilising issue of female candidates. Some divisions, notably Western Australia, have signalled they are in no financial position to fight an election, so resources would be strained.

With the Coalition already lacking a majority in the House of Representatives and Labor maintaining a consistent lead in the polls, Scott Morrison looks set, barring a miracle, to become the shortest-serving substantive prime minister since Artie Fadden’s forty days in 1941, regardless of when the election is held. •

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Attempts by the federal leadership to dismiss suggestions that the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull in August affected the result in Victoria are laughable. The fact is that Liberal and Labor are brand names in the political marketplace, and while voters are astute enough to draw distinctions between state and federal issues, they are well aware that no such distinctions apply to the parties — the same organisation, the same people and, by implication, the same problems.

The crisis engulfing the Liberal Party is not just an electoral crisis; it is an existential crisis. At the end of next year, the Liberal Party — far and away the most electorally successful party in Australia’s history — will mark its seventy-fifth anniversary, but just what the party will look like then, just a year from now, is unclear. Part of its crisis right now is its identity. What is it? What does it stand for? What is its constituency? What does it mean to be right-of-centre and how far should that be from the perceived centre?

Such identity crises have recurred many times in the past, but this time things are different. The party finds itself beset by internal insurrection and, for the first time, under siege from the right by populist agitators and, especially in Queensland, One Nation.

The non-Labor parties in Australia — and it must be remembered that they came into being primarily to oppose the growing Labor Party at the end of the nineteenth century — have had a chequered history, forming, dissolving, reforming and absorbing dissident elements from Labor. The first Liberal Party, under Alfred Deakin, was created with the merger — the so-called Fusion — in 1909 of bitter foes, the Free Traders and the Protectionists, to better oppose the well-organised Labor Party.

After Labor’s split over conscription during the first world war, prime minister Billy Hughes led his “National Labor” group out of the party, later merging with the Liberals to form the Nationalist Party. After another Labor split — this time over how to deal with the Great Depression — dissidents joined the Nationalists to form the United Australia Party. The UAP was derided by its critics as being anything but united, more concerned with protecting British interests than Australian interests, and not a real party at all but rather a front organisation financed and directed by business interests. All these points had a modicum of truth to them.

The UAP foundered during the war, forcing Robert Menzies out of his first incarnation as prime minister in 1941, and all but disappeared at the 1943 election when Labor under John Curtin swept to power in a landslide. From the resulting ruins, Menzies and others picked up the pieces and built what became the Liberal Party.

Failing to win at its first federal election in 1946, the new party gained office under Menzies in 1949. It would remain in power for a generation, until it was dislodged by Gough Whitlam in 1972. It was, of course, assisted mightily by the disastrous split in the Labor Party in the mid 1950s over the issue of communism; this time, the breakaway Labor rebels didn’t join the main non-Labor party, but instead formed the conservative Democratic Labor Party, whose preferences were instrumental in keeping the Liberals in office federally and in Victoria.

The Liberal Party didn’t have to spend too much time on philosophical reflection during its postwar ascendancy. The exigencies of the cold war and Liberal attacks on Labor’s supposed “socialism” lent a black-and-white character to most issues. Under Menzies, the pitch to the “forgotten people,” his iconic construct of aspirational, hardworking middle-class families, maintained a steady rhetorical focus, occasionally enlivened by the injection of fears about communism, aggressive regional nationalists like Sukarno in Indonesia, and the “yellow peril” lurking ominously to Australia’s north.

But it was not all plain sailing. In 1961, the government’s badly timed “credit squeeze” saw the party going down to the wire in the election, just one seat standing in the way of Labor’s Arthur Calwell getting the keys to the Lodge. The party hierarchy — firmly of the belief that it was the permanent government, Labor was unelectable and Menzies invincible — was badly shaken.

From a majority of thirty-two, the Coalition was down to a margin of just two in the House of Representatives. In 1962, the party’s policy research group grimly surveyed the carnage. It was acknowledged that the narrative that had sustained the party since 1949 had run its course, and the group’s report talked of the need to restore the “vitality, imagination and emotional appeal” that had characterised the 1949 campaign. The message to MPs and branch officials was the same: the Liberal Party had to find a distinctive, fulfilling, relevant and continuing purpose. In other words, it had to reinvent itself.

The chief problem, according to the research group, was that the party no longer had a clear and recognisable identity; it had become blurred. Worse still, Labor had captured what would now be called the centre ground, described in the report as the terrain marked “warm, human and positive.” In an effort to restore what it called a sharper identity, the research group borrowed from the British Conservative Party (by then having been in office eleven years), advocating an emphasis on two key themes, which it termed “national” and “rights of individuals.” The former was to be used to talk about security and development; the latter was to apply to traditional Liberal concepts such as equality of opportunity, reward for effort, home ownership, free enterprise, and the recognition of the family as “the fundamental unit of society.”

One issue highlighted by the group — which it attempted to address with greater use of the term “national” — was that many members of the party did not identify as Liberals so much as “non-Labor” or “anti-Labor.” To make matters more confusing, the party even went by different names in some states — the Liberal and Country League in South Australia, for example, and the Liberal and Country Party in Victoria. (The latter was a legacy of a bitter feud between the parties when the Country Party rejected a marriage proposal in the late 1940s and the Liberal Party sought unsuccessfully to eliminate its rival electorally, provocatively changing its own name.)

But little changed. Economic recovery in 1963 prompted Menzies to call an early election, which he won comfortably, picking up seven seats, and the party thought no more about its image. Liberal Party historian Ian Hancock has written that the party organisation, both at federal and state levels, “was no closer by 1966 to discovering the nature of its soul.” It certainly wasn’t a united party. Elements of the party opposed to the government’s introduction of conscription for military service and involvement in the Vietnam war formed the Liberal Reform Group, which later became the breakaway Australia Party whose preferences helped Labor win in 1972.

Out of office for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, the Liberal Party devoted little thought to the problem of image — or what might be called, in contemporary political jargon, the “optics.” The born-to-rule syndrome was very much alive, and the 1972 result (and 1974’s as well) was seen as an aberration rather than an indicator of any fundamental flaw in the party.

But some in the party had taken note of a shifting demographic — a younger, better-educated electorate who had listened to and voted for Gough Whitlam. To win them back, new issues, such as the environment, had to be dealt with. Yet the party modernisers, especially in Victoria, were quickly dubbed “trendies” by the old guard conservatives, and had little impact federally. Led by the uninspiring Billy Snedden (which said much about the shallow talent pool), the federal party did little more than squabble.

At the state level, and especially in South Australia, opposition to change was strong. There, the Liberal Movement, a reform group led by former premier Steele Hall, broke away, with Hall later winning election to the Senate. Although most of the rebels, Hall included, later returned to the Liberal fold, some joined the Australian Democrats, the breakaway party founded by Don Chipp. This former Liberal minister argued that the party had moved too far to the right and had abandoned the centre ground, which he intended to claim.

By the time the Liberals were back in government, after the dismissal of 1975, new currents were starting to flow, challenging the relevance of the Keynesian consensus that had prevailed since the war. The rising New Right sought to bring a harder ideological edge to the erstwhile pragmatism of the Liberal Party, and while prime minister Malcolm Fraser managed to contain the would-be insurgents, they would emerge in force after Fraser lost in 1983, as factions headed by John Howard and Andrew Peacock jostled for supremacy.

The thirteen-year exile ended for the Liberals in 1996, and the New Right was in the ascendant. “The times will suit us,” remarked newly elected prime minister John Howard. The party had moved sharply to the right, but there were also stirrings on the far right that Howard read better and quicker than most. The rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation troubled him: those who had rallied to Hanson’s call should have been his people. While most political leaders raced to condemn Hanson over her inflammatory maiden speech, Howard stayed silent, watching, waiting, listening. Something was happening out there. He had to head this off, and in a very real sense the Tampa stand-off, which would dominate the 2001 election and divide Australia, sprang from this.

In 1998, Howard battled to hold on to office, losing fourteen seats to Labor and trailing in the popular vote. The 2001 election was looking increasingly ominous for the Coalition, especially as the Coalition parties had been all but wiped out by Labor in a Queensland state election in February of that year, with obvious implications federally for Howard.

The Coalition had lost six Queensland seats in 1998, and its remaining seats in that state were looking decidedly shaky. The federal president of the party, Shane Stone, a former chief minister of the Northern Territory, called Queensland Liberal members to a meeting to ascertain their views on the collapse of the conservative vote. He took notes, summarised the concerns in a memo and gave it to Howard, the memo subsequently finding its way into the media.

As Stone reported it, Liberal MPs believed the government was dysfunctional and out of touch. It was seen by the community as mean and had been “too tricky” on a string of issues, which he named. The MPs complained that Howard and treasurer Peter Costello were “not listening” and had antagonised traditional Liberal voters. The Coalition leadership had to be “dragged screaming” to fix its mistakes.

But little changed, and Howard went on to win the election later that year, and to win again in 2004 before losing to Kevin Rudd in 2007. In Queensland, the party’s dismal performance, coupled with its subservience to the National Party, saw moves initiated to bring about the long-mooted merger of the two conservative parties, and in 2008 the Liberal National Party of Queensland was formed.

Historically, the Nationals (formerly the Country Party) had resisted merger invitations, making them the one major conservative organisation to stay outside the Liberal fold. (The exception was in the Northern Territory, where the two parties had operated as one since 1974.) The thinking was that if the Country Party lost its distinctive identity, a rural rump party would quickly arise to take its place. In Queensland, with its unique demography with the majority of the population living outside the capital, the Nationals were dominant and, prior to the merger, the two parties had found themselves in frequent competition with one another for seats.

The Queensland experiment, which was supposed to deliver government to the merged party, has resulted in a single term — the disastrous Campbell Newman government, elected in 2012 with a record majority only to lose spectacularly in 2015. The LNP represents the biggest shake-up yet in conservative politics since the formation of the Liberal Party in 1944, but is unlikely to be emulated elsewhere (and nor is it guaranteed to survive in Queensland).

The federal arrangement, by which Queensland LNP members join either the Liberal or National party room in Canberra, has created more problems than it has resolved. And in giving Queensland a disproportionately amplified voice in Canberra, the Queensland tail can be seen to wag (and has wagged) the Canberra dog. A case in point was the Longman by-election, which was used to attack Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership and set in train the events that saw him toppled just weeks later. The Peter Dutton–driven campaign overlooked the fact that Turnbull was by no means unpopular outside Queensland, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. This fed into the twin Liberal disasters of Wentworth and Victoria, where Turnbull’s removal made little if any sense, and where regard for Dutton was not exactly high.

In a curious way, this sequence of events reprised the Queensland thinking behind the bizarre “Joh for PM” campaign in 1987, when a right-wing populist premier in Joh Bjelke-Petersen mistook his standing in his home state for national standing. South of the Tweed River, his campaign was simply laughed at, and that was what killed it — but not before he had inflicted severe damage on any chance the Coalition had of victory.

In the 1990s, with the simple dichotomies of the cold war over, new battlelines had to be drawn. The culture wars that erupted during that decade became the new theatre of hostilities. Many of those on the right felt that while they had won the economic battle, the left was winning on the cultural front. The Liberal Party, like the Republicans in the United States, would engage in the culture wars as a way of forging a new identity and a new sense of purpose, hoping to attract disaffected blue-collar voters uncomfortable with the values of a new, affluent, left-leaning middle class. The appearance in 1996 of the so-called “Howard’s battlers” looked for a time to be validating this approach.

This process was traced and analysed by the American writer Sidney Blumenthal, in his The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power. He argued that the rise in right-wing activism on the cultural front and in the marketplace of ideas was a radical departure from traditional conservatism, and was driven more by ideological considerations than any devotion to tradition. It was essentially an adversarial movement that needed for its very existence a vision of a pervasive left-liberal establishment, no matter which party was in government.

Blumenthal called this “shadow liberalism,” arguing that while conservatives might hold power they remain ideologically obsessed with the idea of a left-liberal establishment, with its roots in the media, academia and other areas of civil society. “Though they have a sense of mission, they also have difficulty rising above the adversarial stance,” he wrote. “For conservatives, liberals must always be in power; without the enemy to serve as nemesis and model, conservative politics would lack its organising principle.”

Blumenthal’s analysis is applicable to the Liberal Party in Australia, and indeed much of the modern Liberal Party’s toolbox is imported from the United States, most notably in the frequent references to “the base,” a term much used in the Tea Party insurgency that took over the Republican Party. It remains debatable whether the concept even has validity in a broad-based political party operating in a system of compulsory voting. In the United States, it was used to get activists to vote in primaries and turn out to vote in elections.

Perhaps in the Australian context, it is best to read the term as code for right-wing insurgents within the Liberal Party. Certainly, this appeared to be how it was used by conservative NSW Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, in her letter of resignation from the ministry, which helped fuel the challenge to Malcolm Turnbull, when she expressed “concerns that the party was moving too far to the left and that we were losing our conservative base.” Implied in this was a condemnation of Turnbull for not engaging on the cultural front, a criticism also levelled at the defeated Liberal leader in Victoria, Matthew Guy, by conservative commentator Andrew Bolt.

In the wake of the electoral rout in Victoria, several prominent Liberals have expressed their concerns about the state of the party, among them the Senate president, Scott Ryan, a former vice-president of the party in Victoria, who has spoken forcefully against what he sees as an increasingly narrow ideological turn by sections of the party and outside commentators seeking to redefine what it means to be a Liberal. Liberal voters “don’t want views rammed down their throats,” he said, drawing attention to big swings against the Liberals in seats “that are the cradle of the Liberal Party,” in federal seats like Goldstein, Higgins, Menzies and Kooyong. These voters were the “real base of the Liberal Party. They sent us a message… They don’t want litmus tests for what it means to be a real Liberal.”

Many Liberal voters are fairly conservative in their own lives, raising children, working hard, running small businesses, supporting strong local communities, he went on, “but they’re pretty liberal in their political outlook. They don’t want views rammed down their throat, and they don’t want to ram their views down other people’s throat. And that has historically been the Liberal way. We’re often conservative in our disposition — I am — but I’m very liberal in my political outlook.”

Part of the problem, he said, was “tone.” While Victoria’s was a state election, some of the noise that came out of Canberra “did strongly influence the scale of the loss, where it happened.” On the Wentworth by-election, Ryan said some people had “tried to dismiss those voters as not part of real Australia… labelling people, dismissing them — that’s not the Liberal way…” He wanted to “cast the net wide in the Menzies and Howard tradition [so] as to give people a reason to be Liberals, not come up with litmus tests and say if you don’t hold this view on a social issue, or if you don’t hold this particular view on climate change or renewable energy, then somehow you’re not a real Liberal.”

Those attitudes were not the path to electoral success, he concluded. “And I’m sick of being lectured to by people who aren’t members of the party, by people who have never stood on polling booths, about what it means to be a real Liberal.”

A prominent Liberal frontbencher, John Pesutto, whose previously safe seat of Hawthorn recorded a savage anti-Liberal swing, said the party needed to make its language, policies and culture “more inclusive” so that socially progressive but economically conservative people would feel welcome after the “rebuild.”

Whether a rebuild is voluntarily undertaken or forced on the Liberal Party remains to be seen. A possible loss in New South Wales and a likely defeat federally in 2019 will no doubt initiate some soul-searching, which will necessarily involve some deep thinking about what a broad-based centre-right party actually stands for and whom it seeks to represent. The thousands of voters who deserted the party in Victoria — once celebrated by Robert Menzies as “the jewel in the Liberal crown” — will not be won back easily.

Quite clearly, the party organisation has been found wanting, and the veteran powerbroker, and recent state president, Michael Kroger has already fallen on his sword. The question of leadership also arises — in Victoria as well as federally — and raises the paucity of parliamentary talent, itself partly a result of low membership.

Scott Morrison has made a poor start to his prime ministership and is on track to become the shortest-serving substantive prime minister since the forty days of Arthur Fadden in 1941. His glib and cynically opportunistic approach to policy — such as proposing to move the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to bolster the Jewish vote in Wentworth — suggests a shallowness that invites comparison with the hapless Billy Snedden. His inability (or refusal) to explain why Turnbull was dumped does nothing to raise his stocks in an electorate heartily tired of the party’s incessant wrangling. His departure from the chamber as the Wentworth independent, Kerryn Phelps, rose to make her maiden speech bespoke a man without regard for protocol and utterly devoid of grace.

Morrison might well survive as party leader in opposition simply because of the lack of an immediate alternative. Assuming Peter Dutton retains his marginal seat in Brisbane, and that is by no means assured, the Queenslander should under no circumstances be rewarded with the leadership after the damage he has inflicted.

The Liberal Party has many challenges ahead of it. Defining what it is actually about is undoubtedly the most pressing. •

The post What is the Liberal Party for? appeared first on Inside Story.

The dries fancied a spot of economic shock treatment to jolt the country out of its post-recession malaise. The wets agreed, but only up to a point: you also had to consider the poor.

The senior players in the soul-destroying 1993 loss — leader John Hewson, along with Peter Reith and Peter Costello — had all been fully paid-up dries or at least more dry than wet. The wets included names such as Fred Chaney, Chris Puplick and Warwick Smith. Their leading light, Ian Macphee, had been pushed out of his Melbourne seat of Goldstein by an impeccably dry Victorian party president named Michael Kroger in a 1989 purge of the party left.

And John Howard? The failed former leader had been the dries’ leading light in the 1980s, but his old-fashioned social conservatism was considered a poor fit for the pragmatic, ideology-free Australian electorate. And his disastrous 1988 foray into Asian immigration served as a lesson in what not to do. No longer part of the leadership equation, he was said to be preparing for retirement.

In 2018 it’s a very different party, shaped most importantly by Howard’s 1996–2007 prime ministership. Hewson has reinvented himself as a relic of an old, progressive Liberal era. Costello was for a long time the great hope of the party’s left. Howard the 1980s small-government advocate ended up presiding over the biggest-taxing government in the country’s history. There aren’t really any dries anymore, but social conservativism is back in vogue.

And since 2001, when Howard employed astonishingly inflammatory rhetoric ­— at least by the standards of the time — race and immigration have been stand-by election tools for the Liberal Party. Although they were seen to have failed spectacularly in the 1980s, and for the first five years of Howard’s prime ministership were viewed as embarrassing baggage, in 2001 this side of Howard became emblematic of his connection with “ordinary Australians.” Howard was finally out and proud, and voters rewarded him with a third term in office.

Asylum seekers and immigration now lurk within the Coalition parties as potential election life rafts. Encouraged further by events in Europe and the United States, the self-proclaimed “base” — the rabid, highly ideological section of their supporters — demands every leader engage in this section of the culture wars.

The Liberals’ other, more recent, ideological tic involves climate change. It too can be traced to the electoral feats of an individual leader: in this case, Tony Abbott. Howard was the longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies; Abbott was the first federal Liberal opposition leader since Ming to contest consecutive elections — and win the second one. He did it by ferociously opposing Labor governments’ carbon-pricing policies.

Electoral success is the driver of political lessons learnt and modes of behaviour developed. Whether or not the cause and effect are accurately identified is moot.

Immigration and its accessory issues have always been politically sensitive. A technocratic consensus tends to suppress public discussion, which is what makes it so alluring to political insurgents. No doubt it works well in Liberal focus groups. But practitioners of qualitative research are also susceptible to political mythology, and as last month’s Victorian election suggested, ramping up the rhetoric about minority groups isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be for a major party. (It’s largely forgotten that Howard also attempted, twice, to bring Sudanese refugees into his case for re-election in 2007.)

The ramifications of the obsession with opposing climate change action is more clear-cut: it’s just a dead end for the Coalition. They tie themselves in knots and appear, to the majority of voters, ridiculous.

Still, a party’s warts tend to be obvious when it’s doing badly, which in this country means lagging in the polls. It used to be the lot of opposition parties, but in our topsy-turvy post–global financial crisis world governments are usually in disarray while oppositions have a spring in their step. A little over five years ago the Labor Party was the empty vessel, losing elections in state after state, headed for defeat federally, its faults and contradictions clear to everyone, obsessing about “the base” and becoming further alienated from the mainstream.

Give it a few years and the boot will once again be on the other foot. •

The post Warts and all appeared first on Inside Story.

Many have written about the reasons for this, and the political consequences. This was my take in the Age, and among the stand-outs were James Campbell in the Herald Sun and Paul Strangio in the Conversation.

The critical element in most commentary is the same. The times have changed, yet the Liberal and National parties have let themselves be dominated by a clique bent on resisting change. Menzies isolated his right-wing rebels. Today’s Liberal leaders have given them veto powers over policy and party matters alike.

This will change only when the sensible moderates of the party agree that the only way to stop the right-wing fringe taking it over is to go into battle. Monday morning’s intervention on Radio National by Senate president Scott Ryan was an important sign that some of them are taking the fight to the bullies of the right and the Murdoch media. Ryan is an economic dry and no bleeding-heart liberal, but he lives in the twenty-first century, and he’s not prepared to see his party dragged away from mainstream Australia and made unelectable.

This fight will be a long and bitter one. For what it’s worth, the bookies now give the Morrison government just a 20 per cent chance of re-election. If the federal election results in a landslide like this, the Coalition parties will have lots of time to decide which century they want to live in. It will not be a battle for the faint-hearted.

In Victoria, the counting continues. It was a landslide that resulted in lots of close seats, with as many as twenty seats, almost a quarter of the Assembly, likely to be decided by margins of less than 2 per cent. As of now, my reading is:

Labor — 53
Coalition — 25
Greens — 2
Independents — 2
Too close to call — 6

Even that could be rash: more than six seats are in some measure of doubt, including two Coalition seats in the bush, where there’s an outside chance that independents could vault over the field on preferences. Of the six seats I count as too close to call, Labor leads in three (Bayswater, Hawthorn and Prahran), the Coalition in two (Caulfield and Ripon) and an independent in one (Mildura). Labor will end up with roughly twice as many seats as the Coalition parties.

With 80 per cent of the potential vote counted, Labor’s vote had jumped 4.7 per cent from the 2014 election, while the Coalition’s vote plunged 6.6 per cent. The median swing was 6 per cent in Melbourne and surrounding seats, just over 5 per cent in the three regional cities (Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo) and just 2 per cent in the rest of the state — where five seats, against the trend, recorded swings to the Nationals.

To get a full picture of what’s happened to the Coalition, we should go back to 2010, when Ted Baillieu led it to an unexpected victory over an apparently impregnable Brumby government. It was a unique event; it is the only election, federal or state, that the Coalition has won in Victoria since 1996. It stands out sharply against the twelve losses in that time.

Baillieu not only hammered the Brumby government over its mistakes — the most glaring one being its decision to build a huge, ultra-expensive desalination plant at Wonthaggi, which has barely been used since. Along with the usual Coalition agenda of tougher sentences, cutting waste, and so on, he also put forward a positive agenda for open government, including an anti-corruption commission and a plan to tackle Melbourne’s high construction costs. He was known as a liberal: tall, tolerant, intelligent and progressive. Victoria decided to give him a go.

For reasons too many and too complicated to explain here, it didn’t work. Baillieu was forced out in early 2013 after rogue backbencher Geoff Shaw defected to the crossbench. Denis Napthine took his place but was unable to turn the ship around. Labor returned to power in 2014 on a 3.5 per cent swing. The Coalition lost the four Frankston rail-line seats to Labor, Prahran to the Greens and Shepparton to independent Suzanna Sheed, while gaining Ripon.

This is the second election in a row at which the Coalition has suffered a heavy swing. In the seats it notionally held going into the 2014 election (based on Antony Green’s estimates for the Victorian parliament), the combined swing over those two elections has been 9.6 per cent. That excludes the three seats it has lost or looks like losing to independents: include them, and the average swing is over 10 per cent. One in five Victorians who voted for a Coalition government in 2010 voted against them this time.

Sources: Antony Green’s estimates of 2010 vote on new boundaries, and 2018 election results. Swings counted for forty-four seats notionally won by the Coalition in 2010 and contested against Labor or the Greens in 2018.
# Seats lost total includes seats lost or possibly lost to independents.

Part of it was an inner-suburban revolt. Take Hawthorn. It is one of the four seats of Melbourne where rich people congregate. It has been rusted on to the Liberal Party. Labor has won the seat only once in 120 years.

In 2010, Ted Baillieu won Hawthorn by a thumping two-to-one majority. Now his successor, shadow attorney-general John Pesutto, a well-regarded frontbencher seen by many as the next leader, trails by 154 votes and Labor is confident of taking the seat. Hawthorn, a Labor seat?!

Its wealthy neighbours Kew and Malvern, which includes Melbourne’s most exclusive suburb, Toorak, are now marginal seats. In the two elections, the combined swing against the Liberal Party has been 16.8 per cent in Hawthorn, 14.5 per cent in Malvern, 11.1 per cent in Kew and 13.3 per cent in Brighton, where nineteen-year-old student Declan Martin, who joined the Labor Party only two months ago and spent just $1750 on his campaign, almost won a seat Labor has never held before.

Why? See the analysis above. Whether the issue is climate change, patriarchy, race, gender or mode of transport, the Coalition seems to be clinging to the values of last century. The killer ad of this campaign was Labor’s billboard depicting opposition leader Matthew Guy with Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. All of them are unpopular in Victoria, where the polls suggest the Coalition will lose heavily next May.

A ReachTel poll for the CFMEU this week reported that even industrial relations minister Kelly O’Dwyer would lose her safe seat of Higgins. Frankly, I’ll believe that when I see it, but it captures the mood.

The Liberal brand has been severely damaged, and the party has suffered a huge loss of support, narrowing its base to those who want to hear the tough-on-crime message that was its main campaign theme. (“Get Back in Control” is a candidate for the dumbest election slogan I can recall.)

Guy did have more positive things to say on issues like decentralisation, but they got lost in the endless negative campaigns that the Coalition and its media Siamese twin, Murdoch’s Herald Sun, kept hammering at voters: the “red shirts” scandal of 2014, in which Labor hired campaign workers at taxpayers’ expense, the Skyrail elevated train line, and others.

These issues failed to connect. Voters were sceptical that changing the government would change the crime rate. They believe parties constantly rort the system, and the “red shirts” scandal was small beer once Labor repaid the money. As for Skyrail, the elevated line ran mostly through the seat of Oakleigh, and voters there didn’t mind at all. Oakleigh gave an 8 per cent swing to Labor.

In 2010, the Coalition held twelve seats within fifteen kilometres of the CBD. Over two elections, it has lost roughly half of them: Bentleigh, Prahran, Burwood, Mount Waverley, Box Hill and possibly Caulfield and Hawthorn. Those it still holds are now marginal.

But it is not just in the inner suburbs that the Liberals have taken a hammering. It is throughout Melbourne. On the other side of that fifteen-kilometre line, it has already lost another six seats, and Bayswater looks likely to be a seventh. Yan Yean, on Melbourne’s northern fringe, is booming with new housing estates. Labor has built a new train line to Mernda for them, it’s duplicating the main road, and it’s stashing the place with services. Yan Yean too has recorded a 16.8 per cent swing against the Coalition since 2010. What its voters want and what the Coalition offers are two different things.

With the solitary exception of Forest Hill, where new residents are largely Chinese Australians, every Coalition electorate in Melbourne has recorded a swing to Labor since 2010 of at least 7 per cent.

Looking at the Coalition seats where it has done best since 2010, two things stand out. This first is evident in the names of the six MPs:

The Coalition went into this election with just six sitting female MPs. Four of them are on this best performers list. A fifth, Heidi Victoria, is just outside it. It is only fair to add that the party did endorse female candidates for roughly half of Labor’s marginal seats. But they all lost in the landslide to Labor. Meanwhile, the two retiring female Liberal MPs in the Assembly, Louise Asher (Brighton) and Christine Fyffe (Evelyn), were replaced by just one new one, Bridget Vallence (Evelyn).

If the Liberals lose Heidi Victoria from Bayswater, as appears likely, Vallence will be the only woman among the sixteen or so Liberal MPs from Melbourne.

Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger suggested this week that long-serving male MPs retire to create vacancies for women to come through. But just three months ago, Kroger himself steered through a new rule to scrap preselections and renominate all federal MPs. It was widely seen as a move to save long-serving right-wing MP Kevin Andrews from a preselection he might lose.

Second, the only part of Victoria where Labor has not gained much traction has been in regional Victoria — above all, in areas more than 200 kilometres from Melbourne that have always been safe Coalition territory, at least until Cathy McGowan showed they could be won by independents. A year later Suzanna Sheed followed her example by taking the previously safe Nationals seat of Shepparton.

This time former Nationals MP Russell Northe — who quit the party last year saying he was suffering depression after allegations of financial irregularities, unpaid loans and a gambling addiction — held his seat of Morwell as an independent against the combined assault of the Liberals and Nationals. In distant Mildura, a young lawyer, councillor and former Labor candidate, Ali Cupper, appears on track to narrowly defeat Nationals MP Peter Crisp.

Independents also have an outside chance of scoring upsets in Benambra, based on Wodonga, and South-West Coast (formerly Warrnambool) but need improbably strong preference flows to pull it off.

Glenn Druery’s success in turning candidates with minimal support into senators or MLCs inspired a record number of candidates to stand for the Legislative Council. Record numbers of them will win seats when the final votes are tallied on 11 December. More on that when the outcome is clear.

In the same way, the success of the independents is bound to lead to more of them standing next time. Cupper came within cooee of winning Mildura in 2014; she has effectively been campaigning ever since, and this time it looks like she’s done it. Next time the independents will be more formidable again, threatening safe seats on all sides.

What the independents share is a complaint that their areas have been overlooked because governments focus taxpayer resources on the marginal seats that matter for their own re-election. And they’re right. The only way to change this, they argue, is to make your own safe seat marginal — by voting for an independent. They’re right again: Suzanna Sheed delivered far more for Shepparton from a Labor government than Nationals MPs were ever able to deliver from their own governments.

This election saw concerted attacks by independents in several previously safe Labor seats in the western suburbs. They all failed, but some came close enough to put the wind up Labor MPs, including treasurer Tim Pallas in Werribee. One suspects that we may see a different approach to resource allocation in this term of government.

Amid all the retribution, we shouldn’t forget that voters vote primarily on their judgement of governments — and clearly they have given the Andrews government a positive endorsement. The economic times have suited Victoria, and jobs have flowed to match the record flows of new migrants. But the government has also been building the infrastructure that Melbourne is crying out for. The voters like it, and they’ve rewarded the government for doing it.

Two days before the election, Labor revealed the most important policy announcement of the campaign. After secret discussions with the ratings agencies, it announced that it will finance the construction of its $80 billion infrastructure wishlist by gradually lifting the state’s net debt from its current limit of 6 per cent of gross state product to 12 per cent. This is a very important policy shift by Labor — and by the ratings agencies — and a welcome one, so long as it chooses its projects with care and economic rigour.

The next big event in the electoral calendar is the New South Wales election on 23 March. Premier Gladys Berejiklian must be hoping that her voters likewise reward her government for its infrastructure blitz (which, unlike Victoria’s, is largely funded by the federal government) rather than punish it for being made up of Liberals and Nationals.

The bookies think so. They give the Coalition a 60 per cent chance of winning in New South Wales, as against a 20 per cent chance of winning the federal election. But then, at the start of the Victorian campaign they gave Matthew Guy a 30 per cent chance of winning. In reality, he had no chance.

All of which means that the year 2019 will be a very important one for the future of the Coalition parties. •

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The move against Turnbull was a long time coming, and while its justification was couched unconvincingly in terms of issues, its real genesis lay in long-simmering culture wars fuelled by a bitter frustration — or, in philosophical terms, ressentiment — among those on the right. This groups feels that it has won the economic battle (admittedly, against a long-vanished left) but is losing the fight on the cultural front.

Even though a substantial majority of Australians supported marriage equality in the postal survey that the right forced on a reluctant Turnbull, and despite the proposal’s having been duly carried into law, the conservative cultural crusaders in the Liberal Party have never accepted it.

“I felt Malcolm was just dead in the water after that,” a Turnbull ally told me recently. “It didn’t matter what the majority of Australians wanted or even the parliament itself, but the fact that it happened on his watch constituted a form of death sentence for his leadership. He was clearly not part of the tribe.” The issue was certainly the catalyst for ultraconservative Concetta Fierravanti-Wells to quit Turnbull’s frontbench — accusing him of leading a “Labor” government — and to spark a wider revolt.

Turnbull was never accepted as sufficiently tribal by the hard right. The only thing that might have saved him was winning a thumping majority in 2016 rather than the single-seat majority he had to live with.

It seemed not to matter that he no longer pushed his republican barrow. Nor that he bowed to the demands for that costly and quite unnecessary survey. It didn’t count that he retreated from his belief in a market solution to carbon pricing or, indeed, gave up on a whole raft of issues with which he had previously been identified. He was simply on the wrong side of the cultural fence, notwithstanding his continued policy largesse to the business community.

The curious logic of the culture wars is little understood. It is all-out war in which compromise and consensus are despised and seen as capitulating to the enemy. In this case the enemy is anyone outside the immediate tribe (or, as Fierravanti-Wells put it in an interview, her “base” — a frighteningly small proportion of members in the Liberal Party). The “enemy” is everywhere, and an important consideration for the warriors is that ideas are never shared and values are not held in common. It is a simple binary world, a world without complexity or nuance.

A shining example of this rigid mindset is Tony Abbott’s outright rejection of climate change science as “crap.” It has nothing to do with impartial analysis or critical examination of the facts: it is simply that the whole idea of climate change is owned by the “left.” The same thinking (for want of a better word) goes for marriage equality, renewable energy, humane treatment of refugees, public education, minority rights, and so on. In this two-dimensional, black-and-white world, political discourse is reduced to slogans.

While even the hard right could not manage to entertain an Abbott comeback, home affairs minister Peter Dutton was seen as the next best thing to carry on the cultural crusade, but it did not happen.

Dutton’s push against Turnbull was clumsy and amateurish, and it had many of the hallmarks of another attempted conservative insurgency that was launched in Queensland three decades ago, the “Joh for PM” campaign. The fact that Queensland is different from the rest of Australia in so many ways is too easily overlooked by Queenslanders applying their perspective to the rest of the country. Liberals tell me that Dutton decided to make his move against Turnbull after the Longman by-election in August, which saw not only the government failing to take the seat from Labor but Labor increasing its margin.

“Dutton was convinced he could have won it,” one MP told me. Just how this might have happened — it would have been the first time in almost a century if a government had taken a seat from the opposition at a by-election — was not explained, other than by the MP’s surmising that “a Queenslander probably thinks he can talk to other Queenslanders.”

It is difficult to see how the result could be seen as a verdict on Turnbull — but that was how Dutton and his supporters portrayed it. Nevertheless, there was good reason for Dutton to be fearful of the rise in Labor’s vote. His own seat of Dickson is anything but safe.

For Dutton, the Longman by-election result, projected onto the rest of the country, looked bad. It seemed to crystallise his own conviction that he could do better. As he explained after he challenged Turnbull, “For me, I only ever nominated because I believed I was a better person and a person of greater strength and integrity to lead the Liberal Party.”

Just how Dutton as prime minister would have played out in non-Queensland Australia is interesting to contemplate. Could his raw populism, kneejerk political solutions and absence of any discernible charisma survive outside his home state?

Queensland is the only state that, as a colony, resisted separation from New South Wales. Demographically, it is the only state in which a majority of the population lives outside the metropolitan area. In terms of Coalition politics, the old Country Party (now the Nationals) was the senior partner for decades, significantly overshadowing (with the help of a gerrymander) the largely Brisbane- and southeast-based Liberals.

Under long-serving premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who lured wealthy retirees to the state by abolishing death duties, Queensland went its own way. It was increasingly at odds with Canberra, first under Labor but even after 1975 under Malcolm Fraser’s federal Coalition government. With John Howard as treasurer, Canberra sought to act on massive tax evasion identified by the Tax Office, much of it associated with Bjelke-Petersen’s chief backers, the so-called “white shoe brigade.”

As Howard told me in 1993, “they never forgave me… and that is why he came after me in 1987.” That was the year Bjelke-Petersen decided that what was good for Queensland would be good for Australia, and set about undermining both of the Coalition partners in a bid to ride a populist bandwagon into Canberra and become prime minister and saviour.

It was not to be. The “Joh for PM” campaign merely succeeded in ensuring Labor’s return. The rest of Australia looked on with bemusement, never having been told how the insurgent, minus a party, would somehow wrest seats from the other parties south of the Tweed, and especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

The campaign collapsed in laughter, best captured by Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Alan Moir, with Bjelke-Petersen portrayed as a rural hayseed driving to Canberra in a decrepit old jalopy bearing the number plate EIEIO.

And there’s another difference from the rest of Australia. In Queensland, the major parties are under threat from the far right in a way that they aren’t elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that One Nation has its firm base in the state, and if Dutton’s calculation is to head off this threat, he is responding to a fundamentally Queensland problem, not a national one.

The Nationals in Queensland, for their part, have long been under siege from extremists. For many years the long-serving senator Ron Boswell waged an unrelenting campaign against the League of Rights as it sought to infiltrate and subvert the party. Now, with reports of an attempt by a homegrown alt-right movement to infiltrate the party, and with burgeoning discontent at the federal level fuelled largely by elements of Queensland’s merged Liberal National Party, a realignment of forces seems likely.

Tensions will almost certainly flare in the lead-up to the 2019 election, especially in some fiercely contested preselections, where the culture wars will inevitably play out with important ramifications for the future complexion of the troubled Liberal Party. Almost certainly, some of this will spill over into the state arena as both Victoria (November) and New South Wales (March) head to the polls with the Liberal brand damaged post-Turnbull. And the Nationals are once again facing the prospect of another destructive Queensland-inspired insurgency.

Just what will emerge from this turmoil is difficult to predict — but the political landscape could look very different by this time next year. •

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The proposal attracted little acceptance or support, and there has been no significant rise in the number of women in Australian parliaments in the half-decade since then. It’s time for the current party leadership, both in parliament and in the organisation itself, to deal seriously with this anomaly.

Australia can be proud of being an early leader in moves towards equality for women. But it’s important to remember that while we were among the first countries to give women the right to stand for parliament (in 1902), we were among the last to finally see a woman elected – forty-one years later, in 1943.

The slow delivery of that early promise may be why Australia has not progressed to levels reflective of the broader composition of our population. Britain and New Zealand elected female prime ministers earlier than Australia did, and the United States now sees a woman making a competitive bid for the presidential nomination of her party. Australia deserves accolades, though, for our own recent firsts. Among them are the women deputy leaders of both major political parties, a woman as governor-general, women as senior cabinet ministers and several women as state premiers.

But we should be moving well beyond “firsts.” Many capable women should be progressing through party preselections to parliament and beyond. Nor should the underrepresentation of women in parliament be seen as a women’s issue alone: it goes right to the heart of representative and responsible governance.

According to the most recent figures released by the Parliamentary Library in May, just 26.7 per cent of members of the House of Representatives are women – the same percentage as in 2007. In the Senate, the figure is 40.8 per cent, up from 35.5 per cent in 2007. Contrary to Paul Keating’s remark about “unrepresentative swill,” the Senate is much more representative of broader community demographics.

New South Wales (30.1 per cent), Victoria (36.4) and Tasmania (36.0) are the only states in which more than 30 per cent of lower house members are women, and this tends to reflect the quota system the Labor Party has implemented over the past decade. The two territories, the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, do better, and among the upper houses only New South Wales and South Australia are below 40 per cent. The total female participation rates in Australian parliaments are 30.2 per cent in the lower houses and 35.9 per cent in the upper houses.

While Australian businesses and industry still fall far short of the goal of equality, they have taken practical steps to identify, mentor and promote women into roles of responsibility and leadership. Businesses are moving an increasing number of women into senior roles because they understand the tangible benefits that follow.

There is a myth that the imposition of quotas or targets means dropping the bar for achievement levels – that we will only find the best candidates by focusing only on “merit.” But this ill-defined criterion has its own flaws. As Pip Marlow, managing director of Microsoft Australia, wrote in the Australian Financial Review recently, “Believing your organisation hires and promotes on merit is not enough. Why? It turns out judging merit is not an exact science. Such decisions are frequently swayed by bias, because many decision makers have set ideas of what leaders look like and, quite often, those stereotypes are male.” For Marlow, finding and promoting talent is part and parcel of embracing a diverse workforce.

What of the Liberal Party’s performance in this area? Party leaders (mainly male) have spoken positively about the need to ensure that more women enter parliament, but few have made concrete suggestions to achieve this. During John Hewson’s leadership (1990–94) a Liberal Women’s Forum was established to find and promote female candidates; this had some success, but a number of the new MPs elected when the Coalition returned to government were in marginal seats and lost their seats when John Howard’s electoral success receded in 1998.

Since then, there has been little concerted action. Even the federal and state women’s councils have done little or nothing in this area. Dame Elizabeth Couchman, who agreed to bring the Australian Women’s National League into the infant Liberal Party in 1944 on the condition of equal representation of women at every level in the Victorian Liberal Party, would be mortified. Participation by women within the party organisation itself has stayed high because of quota-style arrangements there, but parliamentary representation has stalled.

The prime minister, speaking recently at a Liberal Party state council, said encouraging words about rectifying this situation, but I and many other women are looking to him to put forward concrete proposals to address the gender deficit. If the “merit” standard isn’t providing greater numbers, wouldn’t logic tell us to try another approach?

It’s time now to introduce quotas to boost the number of Liberal women in parliament and give the other half of Australia’s population a voice at the highest levels of decision-making. •

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In the early stages, the move against Malcolm Turnbull had all the appearance of what we call a coup. Following his near-miss first challenge on Tuesday, Peter Dutton began behaving as if the next stage of the proceedings was a fait accompli. The image that captured him talking by phone in the back seat of an official car behind two security officers had a sinister edge. We were confronted with the prospect of a new prime minister hardly ever seen with an expression on his face, whose chief political champion was “Wrecker” Tony Abbott. Journalists who had been blithely predicting exactly this eventuality appeared before the cameras confused and ashen-faced.

It was compelling television across all TV networks. Stories were breaking from every side, and some of the most explosive revelations didn’t originate in the house on the hill. A stunning monologue from Nine’s political correspondent Chris Uhlmann on Thursday morning denounced journalists from News Corp, Sky News and 2GB for waging war on the prime minister and playing an active role in the campaign.

On Monday this week, Kevin Rudd went a step further in an incendiary article for Fairfax, taking aim at Tony Abbott — “this giant wrecking ball of Australian politics” — and Rupert Murdoch — “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.” Later in the day, the now ex–prime minister’s son Alex Turnbull claimed that the Liberal Party was being hijacked by the mining lobby, making it “impossible to vote for the LNP in good conscience.”

Amid all this, the widely advertised Four Corners special raised much anticipation. With the nation’s premier team of investigative journalists on the case, what would be the angle? Did they have another scoop? The short answer was no. From that perspective, the program might have generated some disappointment, though judging by the Twitter feed, the primary response was disgust — not at the program, but at the attitudes and behaviour of the political players.

Yet there was no lack of drama, and theatrical declamations flew thick and fast. “The government lies in ruins.” “It’s an ideological blood feud.” “It’s about bitterness… acts of revenge.” “Rome is officially burning.” Was this Julius Caesar or Macbeth? Barnaby Joyce, whose redneck image belies his range of language, may have spoken truer than he purposed with an admission that it was a matter of “having to work in that darker politics” and “Parliament House… by its very nature, it has a nefarious aspect.”

Following the second spill, Turnbull made his entry into the courtyard in an immaculate blue suit to deliver one of his better performances. He was going to hold the moral high ground for a while longer, enforce protocol, call out the bullies and dissociate himself from the madness. This was where he at last found his fight, observed Guardian correspondent Katharine Murphy. He came to “lay out the terms of his execution.”

It was a scene most of us would have watched before, but this time we were seeing it from other angles. Throughout the program, politicians were filmed from behind, from above, through windows and doorways. In a kind of leitmotif, the dramatis personae were repeatedly seen walking the corridors, their figures reflected in the shining floors.

Romaldo Giurgola’s serene building has nothing nefarious about it. It is transparent, balanced, open and filled with light. Through the comings and goings of a crisis, with people arriving at dawn and still stalking its corridors as the sun sets, the frames of its architecture are a constant. Even at night, when the dark cars pass through its green floodlights as they cruise in for the “last supper,” the building itself seems to stand apart from the madness that has broken out inside it, a greater and more enduring presence than any of its occupants.

Four Corners used many of the documentary techniques so effectively deployed in The Killing Season, Sarah Ferguson’s fine series about the Rudd–Gillard feud. In that series, there was no voice-over and no forced narrative momentum. It’s essentially a quiet style, built up with adept choices of focus, restrained editing and shrewd camera work.

There are intermittent close-up shots of a clock face. Events are moving fast and furiously, and yet the hand on the clock tells every second with a subtle jolt as it makes its way around the dial. Behind closed doors, people talk to the camera. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, in the forefront of the assassins’ team, reflects on the turning points of the drama: the fatal thirtieth Newspoll that marked Turnbull’s failing of the test he himself had applied to Abbott; and the same-sex marriage vote, which she insists was a betrayal of “the base” and an opportunity given to One Nation. “We were bleeding votes to the right,” she comments.

A different side of the story comes through Sarah Henderson, a Turnbull loyalist. Standover tactics were used in the bid to get the critical forty-three signatures on Dutton’s demand for the spill, she says. She was also offered a ministry, but “it would not have been the right thing to do.”

Those interviewed are all from the supporting cast: Craig Laundy, the last man standing by Turnbull’s side; Barnaby Joyce, the disaffected offsider; the National Party’s Kevin Hogan, who vowed to go to the crossbench in protest against the whole shenanigans. And then there are the bystanders and commentators: Katharine Murphy, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, and the party elders, including Alexander Downer, Nick Greiner and Jeff Kennett, offering overarching perspectives.

Given the short turnaround time for this program, it’s no surprise that the leading players are only seen at one remove, through recordings of their public statements. Why didn’t the producers wait some months, as they did with The Killing Season, to allow time to get interviews with Dutton, Abbott, Turnbull, Cormann, Bishop and Morrison? Perhaps there’s a follow-up to come.

As a standalone program, this was a strange hybrid, a creature born of compromise and well-honed technical skills in the editing department. It was Shakespeare without the literary genius, The West Wing minus the witty repartee, House of Cards without the brooding charisma. The events themselves might go down as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And yet something Shakespearean is captured here. By slowing the pace behind the hurtling course of action, the Four Corners team found a way of exploring the effects of power on human psychology. It is, for the most part, an ugly spectacle. But so is Macbeth. •

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Gorton­–McMahon, federal Liberal, 1971: The first contemporary government leader to be overthrown by his peers was John Gorton, who had become prime minister in the political vacuum following the drowning of Harold Holt. Although he enjoyed a long political honeymoon, his government lost sixteen seats in the 1969 election. His arrogance and lack of consultation, combined with his willingness to question dearly held Liberal shibboleths, made him many internal enemies, especially on the conservative side of the party. These forces, which had been readying themselves to depose Gorton, mounted an unsuccessful post-election bid to replace him with his deputy, William McMahon. When a March 1971 crisis involving defence minister Malcolm Fraser culminated in another vote on the leadership, the numbers were tied and Gorton resigned. McMahon, this time successful, was singularly unable to unite the government, and led what may be the leakiest government in Australian history. Labor under Gough Whitlam maintained the political initiative, and in December 1972 twenty-three years of Coalition rule came to an end.

Lewis­–Willis, NSW Liberal, 1976: When Robert Askin retired after a decade as premier of New South Wales, most observers assumed his competent but colourless deputy Eric Willis would succeed him. Instead, in a major shock, Willis was defeated in the ballot by another minister, Tom Lewis. Lewis almost immediately created controversy, refusing to follow convention and allow a Labor senator to replace Labor’s Lionel Murphy when he was appointed to the High Court. After a series of other needless controversies followed, the Liberals turned to Willis in an ambush that blindsided Lewis. The government had already lost a lot of ground, its federal Liberal counterpart was unpopular, and Willis had the misfortune to face a very skilled campaigner in Labor’s Neville Wran, who won a one-seat majority for his party just six months after federal Labor had been thrashed in the 1975 election.

Lowe–Holgate, Tasmanian Labor, 1981: The Tasmanian Labor government was split over the Franklin Dam, a scheme opposed by environmentalists and supported by pro-development forces. Labor premier Doug Lowe, sympathetic to the environmentalists, was unable to overcome the internal divisions in the government. Having been overthrown, he moved to the crossbenches, and Labor went on to a decisive election defeat.

Hamer–Thompson, Victorian Liberal, 1981: The once highly popular premier of Victoria, Dick Hamer, had been weakened by lands scandals involving the government’s planning and housing ministries, and by a group of rebellious younger MPs who saw deregulation as the only way to reinvigorate the state economy. He resigned under pressure, only to be replaced by his loyal deputy, Lindsay Thompson. The government suffered the costs of upheaval without the benefits of renewal, and lost at the election to John Cain’s Labor the following year.

Bjelke-Petersen–Ahern, Queensland National, 1987: After the huge damage of the long-running Fitzgerald royal commission — sparked by revelations of police and government corruption scandals on ABC’s Four Corners — and the collapse of premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Joh for PM campaign, the National Party government was in disarray. Typically, the premier’s fall was both unprecedented and farcical: cabinet finally moved to oust him, but he refused to leave the premier’s office and face a forced resignation. Eventually he surrendered, and Mike Ahern began what he hoped would be a reformist government.

Ahern–Cooper, Queensland National, 1989: Mike Ahern’s government included a large number of Joh loyalists. It was internally split about the direction the government was taking, and was still behind in the polls. Before Ahern had to face the electorate, Russell Cooper led a successful coup. The Cooper government was soundly defeated by Wayne Goss’s Labor Party at the following election.

Cain–Kirner, Victorian Labor, 1990: During his third term as premier, John Cain’s government was engulfed by problems and facing greater internal indiscipline. Meanwhile, the public service unions mounted a militant campaign that greatly inconvenienced the public. It suddenly emerged that three large state-based financial corporations — the Victorian Economic Development Corporation, the Tricontinental bank and the Pyramid Building Society — faced large debts, with government’s responsibility and/or liability at least arguable. In Cain’s view, the decline in talent in cabinet and re-assertion of factional considerations made it difficult to respond effectively. When Joan Kirner took over, she blithely ignored the growing budget problems. Liberal leader Jeff Kennett scored a decisive victory two years later and launched a stinging campaign of budget cutbacks.

Dowding–Lawrence, WA Labor, 1990: Premier Peter Dowding and his successor Carmen Lawrence were both political victims of Brian Burke’s WA Inc scandal. It was only after Burke retired in apparent triumph that the scandals started to mount and his government’s dealings with such corrupt figures as Alan Bond and Laurie Connell proved increasingly embarrassing. Dowding managed to scrape back in the 1989 election, but many, led by WA state secretary Stephen Smith, thought he was increasingly compromised by the scandal. They supported Lawrence to replace him, and she initiated a royal commission that clarified key events, to Labor’s further embarrassment. Even if Lawrence’s performance had been brilliant, which it was not, she had little hope of winning the 1992 election.

Hawke–Keating, federal Labor, 1991: Bob Hawke had been prime minister since 1983, but his deputy, Paul Keating, was increasingly impatient to have what he saw as his turn in the leadership. After tensions following the 1988 budget, they made the so-called Kirribilli agreement, secretly stipulating that Hawke would stand down for Keating after the 1990 election. But Hawke kept finding reasons to delay, and eventually Keating went public, disclosing the agreement. After an initial tilt failed, Keating retired to the backbench, but his supporters continued to stir up trouble, and the government’s every setback was seen as evidence of how it was missing Keating. Six months later, in December 1991, the former treasurer launched a second challenge, which narrowly succeeded. The aftermath was notable for how Hawke and Keating supporters worked harmoniously together. Although the government was consistently behind in the polls, Keating’s strengths as an aggressive campaigner meant that he gradually overtook the Liberals, led by John Hewson, and managed, against most expectations, to win the 1993 election.

Brown–Olsen, SA Liberal, 1996: Somewhat like the Cain government in Victoria, the Labor government of John Bannon was overshadowed by the failure of the State Bank of South Australia. The Liberals felt that their leader, Dale Baker, was not cutting through, and he was convinced to resign. At by-elections on the same day, rivals from different party factions, John Olsen (who had given up his Senate seat to return to state politics) and Dean Brown both returned to parliament. Brown beat Olsen for the leadership, and easily won the subsequent election. But in his first term, he was challenged and defeated by Olsen, putting the government’s bitter ongoing divisions on public display. Labor exploited them, and the government was reduced to a minority government at the next election.

Iemma–Rees, NSW Labor, 2008: In a managed transition after a decade in power, Labor premier Bob Carr was replaced by Morris Iemma. Helped by an inept Liberal campaign, Labor won a fourth term, extending its time in office to sixteen years. But this fourth term was a series of disasters, with the government’s disintegration evident in many ways: the rising power of corrupt elements; the policy exhaustion; and the increasing conflicts in the parliamentary party centred around treasurer Michael Costa and key members of the state secretariat, Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar. Arbib and Bitar thought a political “cleanskin” was needed to renew the government’s prospects, so the little-known Nathan Rees became premier.

Rees­–Keneally, NSW Labor, 2008: Rees’s failure to lift Labor’s polls kept him vulnerable, and he never managed to project a strong public persona. His downfall came when he moved to act against corrupt internal powerbrokers, who supported Kristina Keneally to replace him. This NSW Labor government thus matched the Queensland Nationals of 1986–89 in having two leadership coups in the one electoral cycle. At the next election, in 2011, the two-party-preferred Coalition vote was 64.2 per cent, with Labor’s primary vote shrinking to 25.6 per cent.

Rudd–Gillard, federal Labor, 2010: Kevin Rudd had huge authority within the Labor Party after the 2007 election victory. Yet he was deposed just two and a half years later, the numbers so clear he didn’t even contest the ballot. It is a telling case study in the loss of authority. Rudd’s insistence on centralised control, his inefficiency, his rudeness and his sudden changes of direction all alienated his colleagues. Unfortunately for his successor Julia Gillard’s prospects, little of this was visible to the public, so the change of leadership came as a shock. Gillard and the senior government decision-makers, overconfident of their prospects against Tony Abbott and wanting to get her a mandate as quickly as possible, rushed to the polls, but the spectre of Rudd haunted their campaign. Handicapped by their wish not to mention Rudd, they were unable to promote their own record, including Rudd’s successful response to the global financial crisis. The 2007 majority became a minority, but Labor clung to government.

Rann–Weatherill, SA Labor, 2011: The long-serving SA premier Mike Rann had signalled his intention to resign in the following year, but many felt the government was drifting and losing ground, and there was jostling over the succession. To Rann’s anger, the party forced him to resign immediately, and he was replaced by Jay Weatherill. At the next election, Labor moved from majority to minority government.

Gillard–Rudd, federal Labor, 2013: By the time Rudd replaced Gillard in the lead-up to the 2013 election, Labor’s fate was sealed. Gillard’s popularity ratings were so low by then that many turned to Rudd to “save the furniture,” as the cliché has it. His elevation was meant to rescue them from a plight that he had partly created with his long struggle against Gillard. They did have a short bounce in the polls, but Tony Abbott and the Coalition easily won the 2013 election.

Baillieu–Napthine, Victorian Liberal, 2013: Ted Baillieu’s Coalition had won a single-seat majority in the 2010 election, and the government was soon trailing in the polls. Some MPs resented what they saw as Baillieu’s combination of centralised control and indecisiveness, which magnified a parade of what in other circumstances would be minor political embarrassments. Depressed by attitudes in the party, he resigned, strongly endorsing his successor, Denis Napthine. Despite the Liberals’ attempt to minimise the change, this “circuit breaker” failed to save the government from defeat in the 2014 election.

Abbott–Turnbull, federal Liberal, 2015: Within three months of its sweeping victory, Abbott’s government dropped behind in the polls, never to recapture the lead. In February 2015, a few weeks after Abbott had given one of his new Australian knighthoods to Prince Philip, a first-term Coalition government in Queensland lost its record majority to Labor. Two backbench MPs moved a spill, but there was no declared challenger, and Abbott defeated the empty chair 61–39. Discontent continued over the way Abbott’s office related to MPs, and amid continuing internal conflict and a lack of external success, Turnbull defeated Abbott in September. Turnbull’s approval ratings were initially very high, and his leadership revived the government’s polling fortunes. The government’s optimism almost came undone at the 2016 election, and Turnbull retained government with just a single-seat majority.

This dismal record doesn’t mean that those governments would have survived if there had been no leadership coup, of course. Many, but far from all, of the rebellions were driven by electoral pragmatism, and often it was an already poor polling performance that made leaders vulnerable to other discontents. In six cases, in my judgement, the leadership change — to Willis, Ahern, Lawrence, Keating, Weatherill and Turnbull — actually boosted the government’s electoral hopes.

A change in leaders is often followed by a polling bounce, only for the figures to return to a losing pattern in the longer run. Unresolved policy differences resurface; old (and new) divisions take on a sharper edge. The biggest polling jump came when Turnbull replaced Abbott, and now the biggest drop has come after Morrison replaced Turnbull, with Monday’s Newspoll showing a two-party-preferred vote of 56–44 against the government.

A few of this half-century’s coups were fuelled principally by factional or personal factors, but few of them have been as out of step with public opinion as Turnbull’s overthrow. The drive to be rid of him — among Murdoch columnists and editors, among Sky News commentators, and among some Sydney shock jocks — has been framed as a desperate need to reclaim the “base,” to win back the soul of the Liberal Party, and to stop defections to One Nation and others on the populist right. But the idea that the Liberals must move further to the right because Labor is ahead in the polls doesn’t immediately commend itself to cooler heads.

It’s unwise to generalise about public opinion, but it seems true that the public usually reacts strongly when parties replace those who led them to power, or when they engage in internal politicking rather than governing. Governments follow a well-established post-coup script — with talk of unity, looking forward, renewal, working for the Australian people and the disastrous alternative of an opposition victory — and we are already hearing from Scott Morrison’s “Next Generation” along these lines. But the damage done to the government’s electoral standing over the past week will not easily be reversed. ●

The post Post-coup blues appeared first on Inside Story.

British coverage of Canberra’s latest spill motions — a term at last entering the lexicon here — has on the surface been impressively straight. The Liberals’ power games are well reported, energy and immigration policy cited, and the underlying political problems listed, though the Queensland dimension and the Labor opposition barely feature. There’s no trace of the schadenfreude that has accompanied tabloid reporting of Angela Merkel’s year of troubles. Clearly, sporting rivalries don’t transfer to politics. At the same time, there’s a perceptible motif of bemusement, tinged with the relief of being temporarily off the hook. And the sterling work of reporters on the ground has surely firmed up London editors’ grasp of Canberrology.

At the shakier end was an editorial on 25 August in the tabloid-sized Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s stable, which is currently on an investigative roll. “Democracy Down (Under)” veers from lurid (“ritual bloodletting… frenzied public humiliation… a spectacle of back-stabbing and indeed front-stabbing… leaders are roasted alive if they show signs of losing support in the heartlands”) to arch (“Friends have the duty to say: mate, your system is dysfunctional”), before settling on trite (“Mr Morrison will put the brakes on Mr Turnbull’s shift to the left but will still need to work hard to differentiate his party more clearly from Labor”).

A day earlier, as the drama was climaxing, the Financial Times’s front page had signalled its own view with that alluring reference to “Italian-style political instability.” Inside, a scorching editorial attributed Turnbull’s impending fall to a toxic fusion of culture and energy wars:

The troubles stem from dysfunction in political institutions, a shock-jock right-wing media and a shift to a US Tea Party-style populism within the ruling Liberal party… [Peter Dutton’s proposals] risk consigning Australia to another decade of energy insecurity, rising prices and failure to meet its obligations on carbon emissions… [Business support for a bipartisan approach] makes the Liberal–National coalition’s latest decision to press the self-destruct button over energy policy especially ill-timed.

The weekly Economist, going to press on Thursday, had its customary headline pun fun (“Poison spill,” “Spill will”) before getting serious. “Australians are frustrated by stagnant wages, but they have never rallied behind right-wing populists,” its reporter said. Dutton is “one of his party’s most reactionary figures.” However, “the fad for spill motions” makes the country’s politics look “alarmingly volatile.”

These three publications, while distinct in character, are each at heart centre-right, pro-business, culturally liberal and international. All are dismayed by Britain’s own populist temptations. It’s striking then that their commentaries nowhere mention Brexit, and in this respect they are typical of wider coverage. Could it come to matter that Australia’s leadership tussle is, refreshingly, not being seen through a solipsistic Brexit lens, as has almost every major overseas news story for two years?

The latter was true of the federal election in 2016, held just nine days after the UK vote to leave the European Union. And since then, London’s interest in Australia — security agencies apart — has been defined nearly exclusively by the prospects for a free-trade deal. Alexander Downer’s former status as high commissioner in London made him a fixture on the BBC, while his breezy optimism won favour in the anti-EU press: a rare double. More recently, the farmers’ plight and China tensions have had a good airing. But reaction to Australia’s latest drama, coinciding with fevered divination of Britain’s post-Brexit fate, invites a glimpse of a less inward future.

Dream on? Probably. That Scott Morrison’s early calls were to Donald Trump, Joko Widodo and Jacinda Ardern probably gives Fleet Street’s terrible twins  — the Daily Mail and Guardian  — material for default lament of Britain’s collapse into irrelevance. The Mirror, a robotic left-wing tabloid long eclipsed by Murdoch’s Sun, is already on the case, reading Trump’s empty boasts of friendship with Australia as a “swipe” at Theresa May and a “slap-down of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the Britain [sic] and America.” Whereas the Telegraph’s Jonathan Pearlman, writing in the paper’s Sunday edition, stays on topic in an overview of “this bizarre Australian phenomenon [of] revolving-door leadership.” Of the new prime minister’s first press conference, he says, Morrison “was unable to answer the question the nation, and the world, wish to know: why did his party remove another elected leader?”

Such reports are a reminder of the all-round value of the informed, connected foreign correspondent. Jamie Smyth’s reports for the Financial Times during the crisis, weaving the views of experts such as ANU’s Ian McAllister, Melbourne’s Sarah Maddison, and Griffith’s Paul Williams into a concise daily narrative, are a good complement to Inside Story’s roster. His latest, on the cabinet reshuffle, is just out. That Italian sucker punch, sourced to Kevin Rudd’s former political strategist Bruce Hawker, came from Smyth’s story on the Turnbull–Dutton bout. On the eve, he wrote a long, absorbing piece on the “African gangs” tale, focused on the Australian Rules player Aliir Aliir.

There is of course much more, not least on broadcast and social media. On BBC radio, the ABC’s Geraldine Doogue voiced embarrassment that Australia had become “the coup capital of the world in the democratic sense.” Vox pops with disarmingly contemptuous Sydney citizens provided one highlight, the scabrous politesse of Tonightly clips another. Some British viewers were rhapsodic: “Leave it to the Aussies to cut through the bullshit in the most coarse way and make it sound like you just shared a joke,” wrote one. In face of “the dog-eat-dog antics of their political class” (Roger Maynard in the Sunday Times, another Murdoch outlet), the Australian branch of the international fed-up citizens’ union, acronym optional, is evidently kicking free. ●

The post British eyes on Canberra’s mess appeared first on Inside Story.

Imagine they don’t put it up on their party websites. Imagine they keep it locked in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. (And imagine that the filing cabinet never gets on-sold to an office furniture retailer in Fyshwick.)

Imagine the look on Ray Hadley’s face. Imagine the editorials in the Australian. Imagine the stratospherically high dudgeon of Tony Abbott.

You might say that such a travesty of democratic values could never happen in Australia. But you would be wrong. It happens every time we get a new leader of the Liberal Party — quite often, in other words.

The Coalition agreement that governs the relationship between the Liberal Party and the National Party is secretly renegotiated every time there is a change of leader.

It’s said to set out how many boys and girls from the bush get their R.M. Williams boots under the cabinet table. But, of course, we don’t know for sure. It’s a secret.

The secret Coalition agreement negotiated between Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 was understood to include a proviso that there would be no conscience vote on same-sex marriage, an agreement that there would be no price placed on carbon, and a commitment by the Liberals to support a $10 billion inland rail corridor. But no one knows for sure. As I said: it’s a secret.

Asked at the time about what he hoped the new agreement would cover, Barnaby Joyce answered with admirable candour: “The first aspiration is that the agreement remains confidential. That’s aspiration one, two, three, four, five, and six.”

Just hours after the Liberal leadership vote last Friday — before the blood on the walls had even dried — the Nationals were already lobbying for a new, updated secret Coalition agreement. They let it be known that they wanted the regional and local government portfolio back, a new agricultural visa (for more fruit pickers, presumably) and money for more dams — bless them.

By the end of the weekend the details had been worked out in a series of closed meetings — and then not published.

The National Party’s leader, Michael McCormack, was at his avuncular best on RN Breakfast this morning, describing the secret Coalition agreement as “an administrative document.”

A day after his party’s blissful re-consummation of its relationship with the Liberal Party, Fran Kelly asked the obvious question: “Will you release it in the interests of transparency?” To which the deputy prime minister of one of the oldest democracies on earth replied: “No, no, we’ve never released it. It’s a decades-long decision not to release it.” Well that’s all right, then, isn’t it?

In recent months, the Labor Party’s shadow agriculture minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, has been campaigning for the release of the agreement using freedom of information applications and even the court system, but has so far been unsuccessful.

Labor scents a political advantage in seeing the agreement released, of course, but it is also good public policy. In New Zealand and Britain, similar agreements between parties are detailed and publicly available. When Julia Gillard formed a minority government with the independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott — both former Nationals — a copy of their agreement was made freely available.

In a digital age, how can this lack of transparency continue to be justified with a straight face?

Remember that obscure National Party member Kevin Hogan, who made a bid for folk hero status during all that unpleasantness in Canberra last week by vaguely threatening to relocate to the crossbenches if Peter Dutton ended up as PM?

Mr Hogan is deputy speaker of the House and member for the marginal seat of Page, on the north coast of New South Wales. Even though he is looking at a very tough battle to retain his seat, I refuse to believe his move was motivated by anything as base as his desire for political survival. Obviously he is a deeply honourable MP, steeped in the theory and practice of democracy. So I fully expect him to defend Australia’s hard-won democratic values by going to the crossbenches, and sitting there until the secret Coalition agreement has its own Facebook page.

Until that happens, don’t forget a vote for the Liberal Party is also a vote for the contents of a secret document drafted by the proverbial “faceless men” of the National Party. ●

The post Secret Coalition business appeared first on Inside Story.

But it’s a massive comedown from last fortnight’s 49–51 Newspoll. And Bill Shorten is, for the first time since he faced Tony Abbott, preferred/better prime minister.

You could characterise immediate public reactions to the four prime ministerial assassinations over the last eight years like this:

● 2010 (Rudd to Gillard): a bit of a shock, Kevin wasn’t quite that bad, but I do like Julia!

● 2013 (Gillard to Rudd): Hoorah, Kevin’s back. I couldn’t stand Julia!

● 2015 (Abbott to Turnbull): Hoorah, Tony’s gone!

● 2018 (Turnbull to Morrison): WTF?!

But opinion poll “bounces,” while obsessed over by the political class, are overrated. What matters is the equation that faces voters at the next election.

Morrison’s corny efforts over the years to push himself into the hearts of the voting public, and hence into leadership contention, have had distinctly Wayne Swanish results — that is, they’ve fallen flat. But he became prime minister anyway, largely because of his manipulation of the party room.

Our new prime minister is, in my opinion, a wily — even devious — operator, a more natural political player than Malcolm Turnbull, and smarter than Peter Dutton. “Charisma,” whatever it is, is overrated.

Did the plotters not see Morrison coming?

The first segment of a party leadership change involves making the incumbent’s position unsustainable. The second is replacing him or her with your candidate. So, for example, Kim Beazley’s supporters succeeded in tearing down Labor leader Simon Crean in 2003, but badly mucked up the next bit. (Two words for those who can’t remember how it turned out: “Mark” and “Latham.”)

In 2018 the coup plotters must have known of the danger from Morrison. They must have realised he was every bit as ambitious as Peter Dutton. Did they not even contemplate the possibility he’d run if the position became vacant?

Having said that, it’s perhaps surprising that Dutton got as much support as he did (forty to Morrison’s forty-five) in the second round on Friday. A Dutton prime ministership would have involved some very ugly campaigning on immigration. That so many were prepared to go for him rather than the slightly less conservative treasurer, who has also shown himself willing to whip up public anger at asylum seekers, might be puzzling. (The “Morrison is dead to me after what he did to Abbott” faction surely can be counted on two hands.)

Given the product they were selling, those bullying number-gatherers must have dangled the carrots and wielded the stick very shrewdly.

Bishop unsuccessful because she’s a woman?

The Turnbull supporters’ much-reported manoeuvre to ensure Morrison made it to the second round, which resulted in Julie Bishop’s receiving a very low first-round vote, was harsh but understandable. Without downplaying the sexism ingrained in our blokey political system, in this instance the former foreign minister was done over not because she is a woman but because she’s too much like Turnbull.

Remember how, in the Liberals’ December 2009 spill, the surprise elimination of Joe Hockey in the first round saw Tony Abbott emerge as victor? Given it led to continued blocking of the carbon pollution reduction scheme and all that followed, you could say it turned out for the best for the party, at least electorally. (A counter-argument would be that the global financial crisis and debt and deficits would have produced a change of government in 2013 anyway, and with an emissions trading scheme in place and climate change largely off the table, a more psychologically healthy Liberal Party.)

If Turnbull had to be replaced, Bishop was far and away the voters’ choice. But had she made it to the second round on Friday, she would unquestionably have lost (badly) to Dutton. Replacing Turnbull with someone perceived as equally “progressive” was unsustainable. It’s a right-winger’s turn.

Why the coup culture?

Why is Australia, in the BBC’s Nick Bryant’s words, the coup capital of the world?

One sub-question involves whether prime ministerial disposability evolved separately on each side of politics, or whether it jumped from Labor to Liberal.

In my opinion the factors include these:

● The global financial crisis, with its low wages growth, budget blowouts and so on, made governing difficult and facilitated bad opinion polls.

● Leaders can be changed relatively easily in this country — that is, the whole thing can be over in a week. (It’s different for Labor now.)

● Support for major parties, relics from a bygone era that survive thanks to institutional inertia, is declining, a long-term trend exacerbated by the GFC.

● Our Senate is arguably the most powerful upper house among the world’s parliamentary systems, and very unusually (in the international context) we elect lower house MPs by single-member electorates and senators by proportional representation. It means, now, a big Senate crossbench whose members have no reason to make life easy for the government, and every reason not to. I’ve elaborated on this, with a suggested solution, here.

● And, yes, social media plays a significant role, partly because these echo chambers nudge political and journalist class members to the extremes. In this case, Sky News After Dark — which has some social media characteristics, such as a minuscule number of people screeching at each other in agreement — was important. But Liberal Party members, and even, it seems, MPs, are vastly overrepresented among its viewers. ●

The post Notes from a prime ministerial assassination appeared first on Inside Story.

In electing Scott Morrison, it has chosen the second option. In a party as deeply divided as this one, no one could be a consensus candidate, but Morrison was the closest to it. By a narrow majority of five votes, the party has voted for unity over insurgency.

It is also a vote for continuity. As treasurer, Morrison has been one of Turnbull’s closest colleagues, and has never given a hint of disagreement with the direction his leader was taking. That arm he put around Turnbull’s shoulder at their press conference on Wednesday was not some false mateship hammed up for the cameras. His policies, as far as we know, will be Turnbullism without Turnbull.

A significant footnote: by a majority on the first ballot, the party also elected Josh Frydenberg as deputy leader. He too was the consensus candidate. In effect, the party anointed him as the outstanding candidate to lead it into the future, should it lose the coming election.

To many, it is bizarre that we ended up here. How many of the forty-five MPs and senators who voted for Morrison really believe he will make a better leader than Malcolm Turnbull? This week the best of the nation’s political commentators conveyed a clear undercurrent that the Liberals’ best option as leader was the one they were discarding.

Time will tell. But it is hard to believe that the electorate’s antagonism to Turnbull was so strong that it outweighs our dislike of these leadership coups. There is no evidence that Morrison has won significant support of his own in the electorate. This is likely to be a step backwards.

Let’s just revisit the findings of a recent Essential Research poll on whom the voters — including Liberal voters — wanted to lead the Liberal Party:

PREFERRED LIBERAL LEADER

                              All voters    Liberal voters
                                                %                  %
Malcolm Turnbull              38                 55
Julie Bishop                         29                 12
Tony Abbott                        14                 14
Peter Dutton                       10                 13
Scott Morrison                      9                   7

It is very clear whom Liberal voters wanted as their leader: Malcolm Turnbull. Just one in four wanted to switch to Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton. Those who justified this insurgency as being demanded by the Liberal base were either deluded or trying to delude us.

The most likely election-winner in the field after Malcolm Turnbull had been vetoed was Julie Bishop. In every poll I’ve seen in recent times, she has been the voters’ first choice as Liberal leader after Turnbull. An archetype of the modern career woman, a well-regarded foreign minister, articulate and a political moderate on most issues, she was the candidate most likely to take votes off Labor. She was the one in this field they would have feared most.

Yet she came last in the leadership ballot. The Liberals are a blokes’ party: they have sixty-five men in parliament and only twenty women. Moreover, Team Abbott (or Team Sky) has never forgiven Bishop for abandoning Abbott for Turnbull in the previous leadership coup — conveniently ignoring the fact that Abbott had already offered her position as deputy leader to Morrison. Of the three candidates, she was the one most clearly on the left of the party. In the minds of those seeking party unity at all costs, that probably counted against her, and her electoral appeal was ignored.

Dutton was the candidate of the right-wing insurgency, and of Queensland. If you believe (with one correction) the Fairfax papers’ list of who voted for him in Tuesday’s ballot, he won two-thirds of the votes of Queensland MPs and senators while Turnbull won almost two-thirds of the votes of those representing the rest of Australia. The Liberals’ poor result in the Longman by-election — where they won less than 30 per cent of the vote and suffered a 3.7 per cent swing to Labor in a seat that some polls predicted they would win — scared Queensland MPs, who somehow convinced themselves that their problem was One Nation, not Labor.

But Dutton’s support did not carry outside Queensland, and nor did it carry to those outside the party room’s majority of white Anglo males. Female Liberal MPs and senators voted three to one for Turnbull in Tuesday’s ballot. Virtually anyone from an ethnic minority (except Italian-Australians) did the same. This reflects Dutton’s lack of support among women and ethnic minorities in the electorate, rising to an intense dislike among some for a series of insensitive actions and remarks he has made about refugees, Aboriginals, and African migrants.

The Liberals would have faced huge problems at the election had he won, and the antipathy he has aroused even among some of his colleagues probably meant that he would have to go to an election almost immediately.

Given his electoral unpopularity, it puzzles me that he won forty votes in today’s ballot. Almost half the party room voted for the most unelectable candidate on offer. Either he has strengths that are not apparent to most of us, or almost half our Liberal representatives are focused on their own career paths, vengeance, or who controls the party, rather than on retaining government.

Scott Morrison came fifth out of five in that Essential Research poll, yet now he is number one in the real world. What sort of leader will he make? Will he be, as some expect, Turnbull Lite, making more concessions to the right without changing the overall policy direction? Or will he attempt to heal the division in the party, by making another ideological jump like the one he made under Abbott, when he went from being on the left of the party to being the hardliner who stopped the boats?

Or will his priority be to tackle Labor by standing up to the right where Turnbull folded to them, and setting out to capture the political middle ground that Team Abbott seems to want the government to abandon?

Time will tell. I have just one observation.

In my view, Morrison is generally not a bad decision-maker — judged by those decisions that are clearly his — but he is a poor communicator. And unless he can transform his approach into trying to persuade people rather than harangue them, that could cost the Liberal Party dearly between now and the election.

Morrison on his way up struck me as a sensible, intelligent man with a quick mind. Setting aside the party’s obsession with company tax cuts — there is good investigative work to be done on what drove them to such an unsaleable policy — he has mostly made good decisions as treasurer, as he did earlier in social security. He has appointed good people to key jobs, made sensible decisions on foreign investment issues, and (again, leaving aside the company tax cuts, and the regressivity of the recent income tax cuts) his budgets were not too bad.

But the Morrison you see on TV is different. He reminds me of one of those yappy dogs, straining at the leash to attack. He rarely engages with the questions he is asked, spurting out his lines, always party political, at great speed. He seems to be ticking the boxes for his conservative base rather than trying to win over undecided voters. Even Turnbull succumbed to that somewhat by the end, but he is a far better communicator than Morrison.

Whether or not Morrison has another ideological makeover at this point, he dearly needs to undertake a makeover of how he speaks to the nation. If he stays as he is, that would suit Labor fine.

The first test of his leadership will be putting a cabinet together. Will he bring Abbott back into it? Who will he promote, and demote? Will he opt for continuity, or change — and if the latter, in which direction?

There were many losers in this leadership ballot, but none more so than Malcolm Turnbull.

Turnbull began his time as prime minister with such great expectations and so much public support, only to see it end in less than three years. He certainly made mistakes, many, yet no leader has ever been overthrown by his party for weaker reasons. On the whole, he was a steady hand on the tiller. He was unfailingly articulate, and argued the party’s case well, even if fewer people listened to him. And he had wins on some big issues for his side, getting its income tax cuts and at least part of its company tax cut through the Senate.

Turnbull yesterday described himself as “a reforming prime minister” and listed a catalogue of what he saw as his achievements: getting the same-sex marriage legislation through parliament (although it was a private member’s bill), the redress scheme for those abused as children, childcare reforms, and his infrastructure investments in cities (well, Sydney, anyway). He made a passionate parting comment in support of Australia’s “successful multicultural society,” adding: “We must never allow setting Australians against each other to be part of our culture.” He clearly meant it.

There is no time here to look back at what went right and wrong in Turnbull’s meteoric political career.  He is leaving federal politics, but one suspects he is far from ready to leave public life. Watch for the next chapter in his story. ●

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